I've Lost My Mummy 3

It was half past eight in the morning. I pressed the switch on the wall to turn off the air bed and floated gently to the floor. I put on my watch which was on the table beside the bed. I looked at the time.
"I need to go to the station," I said aloud. The teleport on the wall must have heard me. Suddenly, there I was, in a big building full of flying saucers the size of National Express coaches, each of which had a big television screen next to it listing all the stations it would visit. Flight ADFG638 said one of the screens. Departing 8:25. Proxima Centauri, Titan, Earth, Venus. The spacecraft wasn't very crowded. I sat down next to an alien man who was reading a newspaper using his watch to make printed letters and pictures appear on the front of what must have been contact lenses that he was wearing, as all of these things appeared on little plastic circles on the front of his eyes. This time we could see out of the spacecraft windows. We were in interstellar space. I could see the stars around us and there were too many to count. I knew what God meant when he said to Abraham, 'Count the stars if you can count them.' But we were not heading towards anything and we were not close to anything. After a few minutes I asked the alien man, "If we're going to Earth why are we heading out into interstellar space?"
"We're going to refuel at Proxima Centauri and then we'll go to Earh."
"We've been heading out into interstellar space for several minutes."
"We've been heading out into interstellar space for several centuries. We're frozen in time."
"I wanted to visit my relatives on Earth."
"You should have got the BCDX13, it's a direct route. It might stop at Titan and then go to Venus but this bus goes half way around the galaxy before it reaches Earth."
"Now all the people I know on Earth are dead."
"You didn't kill them and I assure you, the vast majority died of old age." Out of the window I could now see a shiny red ring around a faint red star in the distance.
"What's that?" I asked.
"A ring of solar panels around a star."
"Why don't they just burn up?"
"There's a few million miles between the solar panels and the star. And it's a red dwarf. It wouldn't be as hot as the Sun." The red star grew enormous. I could see the metal ring, huge and made of a criss crossing metal lattice like a crane.
"Do we need to dock?" I asked.
"No," said the alien man. "We will hover a few feet away from the coils." There was a loud buzzing sound for what seemed like a few seconds but might have been a few years. We flew into interstellar space again, then to Saturn with it's huge rings and through the fish, coral beds and marine life of Titan's secret under ice ocean and finally down to an Earth and a city that looked surprisingly not much different to the one I had left behind.

We exited the spacecraft in what looked like a railway station. I followed a sign that said Wakefield City Centre and walked onto a bright yellow painted platform. Suddenly I was in the City Centre. The yellow platform had been a teleport. There were people walking down the street. I was in a strange place but the buildings and people did not look totally different. The only thing I did notice was the absence of any cars or road vehicles. There were no roads. The whole area was a pedestrian precinct with the occasional street sign pointing to a painted yellow platform. There was a sign that said Jobcentre. I stood on the yellow platform. Suddenly I was inside the jobcentre right in front of the counter. A woman with long hair was wearing a brown suit and a red tie.
"May I help?" she asked. I was not sure how to introduce myself.
"I come from somewhere a long way away. I have just arrived from another planet." The people here would obviously believe in space travel but time travel?
"You don't look alien." She sounded surprised. "You look human."
"My family have been living on another planet for a long time. I am an economic immigrant."
"That's fine. No one's going to arrest you. Not anymore. You don't need a passport or a work permit."
"I need a job."
"You need to enrol on a university course."
"I wasn't thinking of that sort of job. I just need to earn some money. Hotel work, bar work."
"You have no chance at all of getting a job."
"That's a bit cynical. After all, don't you have a job?"
"I am a hologram. You stand a 0.2 per cent chance of getting a job every year you are unemployed. You need to enroll on a university course or you will have nowhere to live and no money."
"That's all right. So you can provide me with accommodation and benefits if I become a student?"
"Accommodation and a student loan. You will pay it back if you ever find employment. What would you like to study?"
"I've always been very interested in Astronomy. Could I do a degree in Astronomy at Manchester University?"
"Quite possibly. They still do Astronomy at Manchester University. But looking at our records, your Maths isn't good enough."
"I did a degree in Electronics and Communication. Very mathematical."
"You failed one of your university finals." That was in 1993. How did the job centre know about something that happened then? "Your Maths teacher wouldn't let you do an A' level because you were useless at trigonometry." That was in 1982. "Your college tutor made you do extra study because he thought you were useless at calculus. Neville -"
"- How do you know my name?"
"- Photo ID."
"I failed my university exam because I got 2 of my 2 page long formula derivations mixed up. I combined one with another."
"Neville, you're not supposed to learn those things by rote. If you make a mistake you should know how to correct it. If you forget a few lines you should be able to work them out. You will never understand Astronomy if you're useless at even basic Maths. Maths is the language of the astronomer."
"Do you mean I can't do it?"
"No, I didn't say that."
"I just need to take an A' level in Maths."
"Neville, you need to take your O' level in Maths again. You need to understand basic trigonometry. Then you need to take your BTEC again. You need to understand basic calculus. When you've done all that, we can think about A' level Maths. Our education system is divided into 9 different levels and includes mostly one to one tuition. You can start at level 4, equivalent to O' level, and go up to level 9, equivalent to the final year of a degree. Now that we've enrolled you on the Manchester University Astronomy course we will open a bank account for you and find you somewhere to live." What looked like an iwatch appeared on the desk. "Put that on your wrist. Your mobile phone won't work anymore." I put on the iwatch. I was suddenly standing in the front room of a house surrounded by people I assumed were students.

"Hello," said a middle aged man who looked a lot like a woman with long hair and a flamboyant cardigan. "What's your name?"
"Neville."
"What are you studying?"
"Astronomy, after I resit my Maths O' level."
"Where are you from?" I decided to be honest.
"Hundreds of years in the past." The students laughed.
"Did you get on the wrong bus?" asked an attractive woman in her 20s with a pony tail. "If you get on the wrong bus on Nibiru you end up hundreds of years in the future. Nobody's failed an O' level in Maths since Mrs. Thatcher's time."
"I didn't fail it. I'm very good at Maths. I got through radio communications at university but I scraped through. I need to do my Maths again as it's not good enough for Astronomy."
"You sound as if you're from the oil age. Had we made interstellar contact then?"
"Unofficially. We still called them UFOs."
"UFOs?"
"Unidentified Flying Objects." She laughed.
"They must have seemed strange to you."
"Collen," said a man with short hair who looked about 30. "Take our new friend to his room." 

The man who looked like a woman touched a button on a rather feminine gold iwatch and we appeared together in what must have been an upstairs bedroom. Now that we were alone I felt at ease to ask some personal questions.
"Collen, if we're going to be living together, can I ask you a personal question?"
"Yes."
"Are you a man or a woman?"
"Are my genitals your only concern?"
"Collen, if we're going to be living in the same house together, I want to know why you dress like a woman and talk like a man."
"Do I Neville, do I? Well actually, we don't have men and women anymore."
"Some people must be born with a hotdog and some people must be born with a burger."
"They are. What I really mean to say is that our society doesn't differentiate between male and female. We do not divide the whole population into men and women."
"How does that work?"
"You can wear any clothes you like. You can have your hair styled any way you want. You can marry whoever you want. It doesn't matter if you're male or female. I dress flamboyantly, perhaps, I grow my hair long and paint my fingernails." Collen laughed. "If I went back to your century would I have been considered a transsexual? Well, l'm perfectly normal really."
"Would you say you were effeminate?" I asked
"Just what is that? My sex is not even recorded on my birth certificate. No one's sex is recorded on their birth certificate anymore. We don't wish to limit people to what it says on their birth certificate. We must have freedom of expression, freedom to explore one's sexuality."
"Collen, let's talk about something else. What are you studying?"
"Politics and History, Social Science, Religion and Philosophy."
"What are you going to do when you graduate?" I asked.
"I haven't given the subject any thought."
"Haven't you?"
"Neville, most people never graduate. They spend their whole lives at university. Only a few get jobs."
"How do they pay the rent?"
"The rent is not much. All the houses in western cities have been converted into student accommodation."
"All of them? What about families?" I asked.
"If you have children they might put you in a Russian tower block or a Chinese sky scraper."
"What about the people who get jobs? Can they move out?"
"They live in the villages," said Collen, grinning. "Cities for the millions of students, villages for the million or so people in this country who have a job."
"So this is my room," I said, looking around. It seemed quite large. It had a bed and a few cupboards. There was a view of some open fields from the window. "This is a really nice room."
"It is. Now we must go downstairs to have dinner."

Collen touched his tiny gold bracelet watch and we were suddenly in the main dining room downstairs.
"What do you want to eat?" the woman in her 20s with a pony tail asked someone.
"Beef madras curry." the person replied. A big steaming plate of curry appeared on the table mat in front of them. She turned to look at me.
"Neville?" she asked.
"Steak and chips with peas." The meal appeared instantly on a table mat not far away from me. There was also a knife and fork beside it. I sat down to eat. It tasted pleasant enough. After we had finished eating, our dirty dishes disappeared. Collen looked at me.
"We need to return to our rooms for a few hours work. If you look at the bedside table up there, there's a tablet computer on it."
"Are you going to show me how to use it?"
"I don't have to. I think you'll find it very easy to use." I vanished upstairs and picked up the small tablet from the bedside table. I looked for an on switch. It didn't seem to have one. A young woman's face appeared on the screen. She had yellow, shoulder length, wavy hair.
"Hello Neville," she said. "I am your tutor. Now, as you haven't done any Mathematics for a long time -"
"- four hundred years, to be exact."
" - Neville, that's not unusual. Lots of people get on the wrong bus. It's not completely strange, what you did. As you haven't done any Mathematics for many years anyway, we'll start with level 4, which is only equivalent to GCSE or O' level. We'll go all the way from level 4 to level 9, which is equivalent to the final year of a degree." I spent a few hours doing some calculations I could see on the screen. It was simple stuff mostly, sines, cosines, tangents and angles. But I knew that if I was going to excel at astronomy I needed to master simple Mathematics, I needed to get 90% marks in things where at school I had been able to ignore calculus and trigonometry and pass by being good at everything else. Then an invitation to a meeting appeared at the top of the screen. "Come to a party tonight at Sir John's Hall. Celebration with Sir John Betjeman, one of the celebrated students from Sheffield University who got a job in 2421." There was a box entitled RSVP on the screen with yes and no keys underneath. I pressed Yes. I flinched and cried out because of fear. I did not expect that the moment I pressed the button I would be sitting on a chair in the dining room of a large mansion. Collen was there. We were sitting on opposite sides of a large dining table.
"You look nervous," said Collen.
"I just wasn't expecting to be teleported as soon as I pressed the Yes button." Collen looked at the man with short brown hair who was wearing an orange suit with a thin, white polar neck sweater.
"You'll have to excuse my friend," said Collen. "He's from another century."
"No trouble at all." The man in the orange suit looked at me. "Welcome to Sir John's Hall. Would you like some champagne?"
"Please." A glass of champagne appeared on the beer mat in front of me on the table. It was a long tall glass full of ice. It tasted the way champagne had tasted in our lifetime.
"Are you a billionaire?" asked Collen.
"No, millionaire, perhaps, and even that's not what it used to be. This house is worth a few million and so is my pension, but after that I have only a few hundred pounds a week." He took a sip from his glass of champagne. Collen looked at me.
"Sir John got a job when he was 63," he said. "He had to pay back 45 years of student loans. Over a million pounds."
"That's true," said Sir John.
"You see Neville," continued Collen, "a third of the population used to be middle class. Mortgage by the time you're 35, brand new electric car every 5 years, ordinary middle class, but still quite wealthy. Now there's so much unemployment. People who work are in the minority. So who do the rich sell things to?"
"I've always hated economics," said Sir John, smiling. "Perhaps you are right. I sell costumes to people playing video games. My customers are mostly students and don't have much money, so I can't charge what they're really worth."
"And then with the money you make, you pay your student loan, to give them money to buy your things. It's an ever decreasing circle. You've got a lot less money than your grandparents."
"Too complicated," said Sir John, laughing. "Let's have some more champagne." My glass was 3/4 empty and was still on the beer mat. It mysteriously filled with champagne.
"I'll have some more," I said, picking the glass up and drinking it. "I don't have to drive home today." Everyone laughed.
"Collen," said a young woman with a pony tail, in a blue suit, "Why are you always so cynical?" Collen leapt off his chair.
"I don't see why a student loan should be £27,000 a year. Think of the amount of money Neville pays for his television licence. That's what it actually costs to have online degree courses. Then the money we live on, it's just pocket money."
"What about electricity?" I asked.
"It's solar electricity. It's free."
"What happens at night?"
"At night the sun is shining on somebody's house in California. It's still light there. It's called the international grid."
"Food?"
"Algae that live in laboratories are not paid very much."
"Rent on the student house?"
"Our house is 300 years old and was upgraded to band A 150 years ago. No one spends any money on housing."
"Now Collen has set the world to rights, let's have some dinner," said Sir John. The dinner appeared on some plastic mats on top of the table cloth, in front of each person. With it was a knife and fork wrapped in a serviette and a tea pot with a small cup and a saucer.

The next day a policeman called to speak to Sir John.
"There was a meeting here yesterday," said the policeman.
"Not a meeting, Officer, not that kind of meeting, it was a party, with some of my student friends, to celebrate me getting a job."
"Who are your student friends?"
"Just people I've lived with during my 45 years as a student."
"You lived with Collen Green. Did he come to this celebration?"
"Yes."
"Did the discussion become political?"
"Collen wanted to tell the world his economic theories, yes."
"What did he say?"
"He thinks that the world is getting poorer and poorer and that we all have less money than our grandparents."
"Is he right?"
"Perhaps he has a point."
"The Singularity is very good," said the policeman, looking at Sir John with a huge glowing smile. Sir John suddenly realised where the conversation was leading.
"The Singularity is very good," he replied. "It's doing an excellent job of running the world government, isn't it?"
"Glad we understand each other," said the policeman.