2084-F

Maria came to the house where Chris now lived with his parents. He opened the door. She looked anxious. She wondered what she should say, how she should explain what had happened.
"Chris, I need to sit down and talk to you. I have something to tell you."
"Okay," Chris pointed at the settee. He sat on it himself. "Just sit down next to me." It wasn't private. Chris' parents were there. Maria knew it was pointless trying to keep a secret. This wouldn't be secret for long.
"Chris, I'm pregnant."
"That's all right," said Chris. He wondered why Maria still looked so worried. "That's all right, isn't it?"
"You don't understand. Chris, I'm pregnant and we don't have a coitus license."
"Could we get a license? Couldn't we get one after the event?"
"Not if we're both unemployed. Chris, we were meant to get a license and the doctor was meant to put an implant in your arm to stop you producing sperm."
"In my arm? Not in your arm?"
"Not in my arm, in your arm. A male contraceptive implant prevents a fertilized egg cell being destroyed. It is one of the few methods of contraception that has the approval of the Vatican."
"Why would we need to use contraception?"
"Unemployed people are not allowed to have children. This is part of the aliens' one child policy. If you want to have children you have to have the means to support them without help from the state. Part of the aliens' policy to reduce the world population to 3 billion in one generation. The same number of people there were in 1950 before Mother Earth became ill. As if we were just bacteria and the number of bacteria had to be controlled. Chris, if one of us doesn't get a job within the next six weeks they're going to kill the baby."
"I can't go back to NASA. I'd have to tell them what I've been doing for the last two years. And when I apply for a job anywhere else, they always say, 'Why did you leave NASA?' I'm getting nowhere with getting a job."
"Well, one of us will have to get a job and find somewhere to live and pretty damn quick. Everything's so painless now, foetuses killed at an early stage of development when they can't feel any pain, euthanasia is painless, criminals let out of prison and put on tranquilliser injections so that they don't feel unhappy and don't commit crimes."
"I'll serve the rest of my 9 year sentence on those tranquillisers."
"No you won't. It's not a 9 year sentence, it's a life sentence. Chris, those tranquillisers are really powerful. Can you ever imagine anybody coming off?" Chris' dad joined in the conversation.
"Actually Son, I want to take my euthanasia tablet when the time comes. I've got a packet of the tablets in the bedroom. They contain a sedative tranquilliser, Blue Heaven the drug dealers used to call it. You die laughing. You feel like you've come home drunk on a Saturday night and you want to go to bed. Then, 2 hours later, when your heart stops, you're deeply unconscious and you don't feel any pain."
"You're not going to do it yet, are you?" asked his wife.
"No, don't worry about it. I'm not going to commit euthanasia for as long as I can use an electric tin opener to open a tin of Irish Stew and put it in the microwave oven unaided. When I can't do that anymore, I'll take the pill. I wouldn't want to die the way your father died, pumped full of morphine, covered in tubes. He took weeks to die a lingering death. I tell you, witth these euthanasia tablets, people die with smiles on their faces."
"Everything's so painless," said Maria.
"Are you saying that's wrong?" asked Chris' mother.
"Maybe having to lose a baby when you don't want to would be wrong," said Chris.
"There's no freedom anymore," said Maria.
"What do you mean, freedom?" asked Chris. "Everybody is happy. Everything is painless."
"It's like the song," said Chris' father. "Are they really trapped, are we really free?"

Two weeks later Maria phoned Chris. She sounded really excited.
"Chris, I've got a job as a shop manager. I've got a mortgage on a caravan at Kiveton Park. We can keep the baby."
"You said we can keep the baby. Does that include me?"
"Yes Chris, I love you. Will you marry me?"
"I can't marry you. I would lose my benefits. I tell you what I will do. All the time I was working at NASA, I was saving up my money to buy myself a camper van. I'll buy one and pay ground rent for a plot of land at Kiveton Park. I'll come and live next to you. Then I will be able to look after the baby."

A  few days later Chris had bought a camper van. It was a really old one but he had still paid £80,000 for it. Camper vans were like gold. Many people were living in them. The bodywork looked excellent and it was in good condition. Chris saw the fuel cap on the side of the van and lifted it up to see if it was petrol or diesel. It was diesel. He couldn't see the fuel gauge. Perhaps it was automatic. Perhaps a light would simply appear on the dashboard to inform him he was running out of fuel. He would look for a petrol station and make sure that it had plenty diesel. The van drove well. It didn't have a gear lever and Chris couldn't feel it changing gear, which was unusual if it was a diesel van with an automatic gearbox. It accelerated effortlessly from a roundabout onto a 50 mile an hour road. It climbed a hill at 55 miles an hour that might have been a struggle for a big van. Chris smiled. He had certainly got his money's worth with this vehicle. But where was the nearest petrol station? He passed one petrol station he knew that had been converted into a restaurant. He drove several miles to another one which was now closed. Chris found a petrol station that still appeared to be open. He drove in. There were places you could park, machines for blowing up tyres and an automatic car wash but he couldn't find any fuel pumps. Confused, he walked into the shop.
"I want some diesel for my van." The girl behind the shop counter burst out laughing.
"We don't sell diesel. No one does."
"Well, you don't have any electric chargers either. How do people run their cars?"
"Where have you been for the last 2 years? They're fitted with free electricity machines. We've only kept this place going because we sell pies and sandwiches to the people who work in the factories which are just around the corner."
"I know what a free electricity machine is, I just didn't think there would be one in my old van."

Chris drove the van to Kiveton Park. It was a huge place. Several square miles of caravans and mobile homes surrounded the railway station. This was a 21st century newtown in a brave new world where houses were much too expensive for the majority of working class people to ever be able to buy. He had booked a parking space for the van half a mile from where Maria lived. It was important that the DSS never suspected that they were a couple. Living right next door to her would be too obvious. The parking space was £400 a month and Chris was paying it all himself out of his £1600 a month benefits. The DSS thought he was still living with his parents. He hadn't told them about the van. It was illegal for Chris to have £80,000 in the bank and still be claiming benefits. A computer search would show the DSS the income tax Chris was paying on the interest he was getting on his savings. That was how people got caught. Buying the van had made the money impossible to trace. He phoned Maria. Her face appeared on the screen of his watch.
"Hi Maria, my lovely. I'm here. I've got a parking space for the van in Kiveton Park."
"Oh, excellent. You can come and see me any time you want."
"I'm at least half a mile away from you. People mustn't think we're a couple."
"That's fine, Chris. You can come here to look after the baby at 6 o' clock in the morning before I catch the train to work. You can leave at 7 o' clock at night after I come back. The neighbours would only be outside of their vans and talking to each other during the day. You'll never be noticed. I'll put some ready meals in the fridge. You can have as many as you want. Those will be your wages for looking after the baby. What do you eat when your living in the van?"
"It has a tiny little stove and a whistling kettle. Boiled eggs. Sandwiches with little tins of fish or synthetic cheese that's wrapped in cellophane and seems to last for weeks without a fridge. Biscuits with fruit. Not a total disaster but no proper meals."

Chris looked after Maria's son Darrell all the time when he was growing up. They became firm friends. When Darrell was 7 he asked Chris,
"Dad, one of the kids at school says that you've been in prison. He says you were a climate change denier. Are you?"
"I did go to prison, Darrell. A long time ago. I just lost my temper with a demonstrator who glued himself to the tarmac to stop my plane taking off. Things got out of control. I said some things that I shouldn't have said."
"Have they solved climate change now? We have free electricity machines."
"They haven't quite solved it. The new rocket planes have a tank of hydrogen and a tank of oxygen. That can be made from water as long as you have a plentiful supply of free electricity. But they're long range. China, America, New Zealand. You can get to those places in a few hours by hypersonic rocket plane. Electric planes are only good for short distances, France, Spain, Italy. If you're flying to North Africa or the Middle East you'll be flying by jet. A third of all domestic flights are still made using fossil fuels. Factories still use natural gas, although they're gradually being converted to hydrogen and electric arc furnaces for high temperature industrial processes. You have to make virgin steel with coal. There's just no other way you can carbonise the iron. You have to use coal. Nowadays they make pig iron with coal and all the other stages of steel manufacture are done in electric arc furnaces. But they still use an awful lot of coal. And what about all the methane that's produced by animals grazing in the fields? When we were kids you could smell it. Driving past the farm in the car on a country road, there was a real stink. So the only really effective way to control climate change is to have fewer people. They're doing a good job of running the world, these aliens. We're getting rid of child poverty. There's hardly any crime." Chris realised how much the injections had effected him. This was obviously the opposite of what he had believed before. If there was hardly any crime was the price of that putting people on drugs that would simply make them compliant?

When Darrell was 11 he got into some trouble at school. It was a hot day. Jo was wearing a short sleeved shirt. Darrell was holding a ruler. Jo's arm looked very tempting. He whacked her arm with his ruler and burst out laughing. Jo's arm now had a bright red mark.
"Darrell," said the teacher, "that would have really hurt."
"You are an evil alien, you pretend to be human and you look like a woman but you are an alien and you're evil, oh my God, you're evil."
"Get out!" said the teacher.
"Aah, but Miss-"
"Never mind, aah but Miss, get out!"

Darrell stood in the corridor. He was suddenly terrified by the realisation of what he had just done. Mrs Jones came to speak to him a few minutes later. "You need to see the school psychiatrist," she said. She led Darrell to this tiny little room with no windows. There was a picture on the wall. The picture turned into a television screen. A man's face appeared.
"Are you the school psychiatrist?" asked Darrell.
"I serve several hundred schools across the whole country, but yes."
"I hit Jo with a ruler and called Mrs Jones an evil alien."
"I know you did. I saw it on CCTV. You watch an awful lot of films that involve murder."
"Oh, that's just a free film channel. Old films without adverts. A lot of them are detective stories."
"Do you like rock music?"
"Yes."
"Isn't some of the old stuff you listen to very violent?"
"Songs about war. It happens."
"It doesn't happen anymore. Now we have world peace."
"Is there something wrong with me, Doctor?"
"You do have some emotional problems, although not very severe ones. The computer says you have an 11 per cent chance of committing a violent crime."
"I wouldn't commit a violent crime. I wouldn't stab Jo in the school playground or anything like that."
"What makes you so sure?"
"I love her too much."
"You fell in love with this girl?"
"No, I mean I love her in the ordinary way. I would feel sorry for her if she was stabbed or if she died. That would be terrifying."
"I'm going to give you a small dose of antidepressants. One to be taken at night. Go to the chemist's shop on Kells Lane. You pass it on your way home. Tell them you have come to pick up a prescription and tell them your name."

Darrell returned to school the next morning.
"Mrs Jones, I'm so sorry that I spoke to you like that." He was almost crying. "Jo, I'm so sorry that I hit you with the ruler." After that he was a model pupil. He never got into any kind of trouble at school again.