Chapter One

      Jack Smith hefted his rucksack of ‘dummy bombs’ to set off for the trial run. Leaving a sack of river cobbles in the basement of the Doughnut could be explained away if anyone found them. If nobody found them during today’s work shift, then next time they’d be real bombs, not just stones. Jack expected that, on 10 September 2089, he was going to cause the biggest act of terrorism for fifty years.

      Jack did not lock his front door. There would be no burglary; he closed it to keep out animals and bad weather. Because of his work as a sifter, nobody could ever get away with a crime, so people simply didn’t bother to try.

      He flicked a switch to connect the roof solar panels to charge the battery collection under the stairs inside. The old electricity storage units were more than sixty years old and no longer held charge very well. As with most technology, they needed careful nurturing.

      The house was on the outskirts of old Cheltenham, a nice residence that had suffered little from its abandonment in the Times of Malthus. It had originally been in the last street before the countryside, both a city house and a rural house. Now that nature was reclaiming much of the urban areas, this borderline was blurred.

      Jack liked his home; the proximity to fields and woods was settling. Grannie Ellie’s farm was in the midst of similar woods and fields. A few other farmhouses had been visible as Jack grew up, but he and his grandmother had had a swathe of countryside to themselves. At his garden gate, he wondered if animals and vegetation, or indeed people, had taken back his childhood home in the year since her passing. At the memory that Ellie was gone, the weight of the rucksack made his legs wobble, and he had to steady himself with a hand on the gatepost.

      Jack’s walk to the Doughnut was mostly through derelict streets, the houses dark and mouldering, long abandoned. He crossed the old railway. The metal tracks still lay in perfect straight lines, red-brown stripes running along a grass corridor through semi-ghost town. The route was easy walking in any weather — the roads were fine for pedestrians. Flooding and winter snow and ice had combined to ruffle and pit the asphalt surface. Had any of the rusting cars been started up and driven around the empty streets, it would have been rough going for them, impassable in places.

      ‘Morning, son.’

      Jack leapt away from the sound of the voice and hit his thigh against a front garden wall. In the doorway of a house across the road, an old man smiled and gave a brief wave. Jack looked up and down the street. He stuttered back, ‘Goo-good morning.’

      Jack kept his back to the wall and sidled away, the rucksack’s base scraping on the top of the crumbling bricks. The old man said nothing further, and stared.

      Here and there, houses were occupied and Jack would normally wave or greet people he saw on his route. He knew them all by sight, but rarely held any long conversations with anyone. With daily twelve-hour working shifts, and over an hour’s walking commute each day, Jack did not have much time for chit-chat. Today, he was carrying twenty kilograms of dummy bombs. Chit-chat was definitely not going to happen.

      Across the cricket pitch, still well maintained and in regular use, and a footbridge over Hatherley Brook, the route led him onto the tarmac fields surrounding the Doughnut.

      All the sifters for southwest England, and the whole of Wales, worked in the Doughnut. The old government had established the ring-shaped building for its spies and information thieves to work in. After the signing of the Covenants of Jerusalem, numerous communities had repurposed bits of its computing power for their own surveillance sifters.

      The glass and steel torus was enormous, and each sifter had a significant space in which to work undisturbed. With the global population crashed to less than 100 million, England as a whole had only eighty–three Kangaroos — the remaining population groupings. The number of sifters at the Doughnut was far fewer than it could have held, and there was little interaction between them. Most of the roof of the building was now covered in solar panels — the electricity grid had long since been abandoned in favour of small, local, renewable generation.

      Jack had a second floor workspace entirely to himself. The Doughnut was constructed in thirds, and his area covered a chunk of the Western Third. Whilst the Northeastern and Southeastern Thirds overlooked parts of Cheltenham, he had panoramic windows that looked out in the direction of Wales. Eventually, although obscured by mountains, the view faced the Irish Sea.

      Each sifter could arrange their own workspace as they wanted to, but Jack had followed the example of his mentor and developed a horseshoe of display screens on three levels. These twelve screens half enclosed him when he sat in the black swivel chair, which had moulded over fourteen years to fit his exact body shape. He put his lunchbox on his desk and headed downstairs.

      The basement of the Doughnut housed all of the computers that ran the infonetwork and digital records, including all audiopt feeds, for the same region of southwest England and Wales. Although these were all housed in the same building, each village population — or Kangaroo — had a separate computer server for its local infonetwork. The individual systems were each maintained by a pair of engineers, the infotechs. The Fifth Covenant of Jerusalem meant that although the region’s various Kangaroos all had their sifters