Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
Suddenly, Pool felt a wave of hope. He hadn’t felt anything for a very long time, so the feeling was strong, but migrated quickly to elation. He had almost forgotten he was as naked as a babe.
The anthromorph pulled him through squelching muddy steps to the embankment. Iridescent rivulets of unnatural industrial juices flowed out of pipes into the river around him.
“Where…when…?” Pool struggled to speak, interrupted by choking coughs.
“Londbridge,” it said. “2330, 23 September.”
“You will want to wash. The water of the river is toxic. Avoid open flames,” it said. “Wear this,” handing Pool a rubberized thing like a cup. It made a gesture indicating that it was to go over his mouth and nose. “breather.”
Nila had used those words. That word.
To his surprise the air that he inhaled through the cup, through the breather’s short, stubby, metallic whiskers passed more easily into his lungs. The light-headedness that he had been unaware of experiencing soon passed as the poisons were filtered out.
Pool’s skin on the other hand burned and had developed blotchy red patches, and his unprotected eyes stung.
He could not tell what time of day it was. The sky was an undulating mass of low brown and orange clouds–he had seen what he had previously thought of as the industrial hell of Londbridge in the 1870s, but this was something out of hell’s imagination.
Great spires of glass and steel and unnamable substances rose up to unfathomable heights, looming over the fetid swamp of a river. Here and there great geometric monstrosities so massive he could feel the pull of their weight squatted like giants.
The rusting hulks of ships’ hulls poked out of the so-called river, out of the muddy flats of the banks, bizarre shaped things, neither river-craft nor airship, but blocky constructions. One near to him oozed a green filth, that he was sure was glowing.
And then there were the lights. More lights, points, lines and vague spreads of ambient lumination, projections in the distance, hanging in space. These lights would have turned night into day, if night and day could even be distinguished here.
There were shapes of people (or they could be shapes of these ‘anthromorphs’ as they call the mechanical ones) stumbling around on the surfaces, up the bank from him. But also flying things. Small airships without the envelops suspending them as in his day. Some probably carried people; Pool had seen these before via Nila’s associations, but the…commonality, the ubiquity of it surprised him.
The anthromorph was still standing there, slowly sinking into the silten mud it seemed. Its feet and lower legs were calmly squelching as it stepped upwards every few seconds, but as the mass (which he had previously guessed was greater than his…or was that the metal one on the suboceanic vessel?) pulled it deeper, than his own mass would have pulled him.
Pool suddenly became aware of, or remembered the tides of the Thames. The reason for the many hulking wrecks protruding out of centuries of mud was the tides ravaged the estuary twice a day.
Ravaged was the wrong word. The tides used to bring nutrients beneficial to the submerged and hidden shellfish.
He looked again at the slimes and murk and wondered if anything lived in the mud and silt or waters of the pathetic wreck of a river the Thames had become.
Unless they had built a seagate or some such device to restrict the tides, the water would return. It was clear that this was, at this moment at the lower extreme.
And he was naked as a babe.
Ion Fyr 