Albion

I nside her home, with the radiscreen crackling softly in the background, Annabelle Christopher inspected her helmet, carefully studying its inscrutable glass visage.

Outside her window, the bright green beaches and violet waters lay still beneath an artificial sky. Only once had Annabelle caught a glimpse of the real sky - not the sky as it appeared, shining a tempered blue, with the faint hint of dusk on the horizon, but the celestial tapestry of indigo and vermilion hidden behind an array of cameras and filters - ‘the lights’, as they were known.

‘My first day as a diver,’ she whispered with quiet conviction, returning to the helmet. ‘It will work.’

She removed its filter, dutifully crafted to replace the brilliant purple waters of the local seas with a more familiar blue. She felt a sudden urge to go for a walk.

As she left, she scowled at the wilted grass outside, another failure of the abortive ‘regrowing project’, and started off into town.

A few paces from her house stood a sign welcoming any visitors, few though there were, to the great new land of Albion.

She remembered, vaguely, a time when her home of fifteen years had been known by the more clinical name of K2-18b. But the government of the day had liked Albion, so Albion it became.

Through our glorious past we shall forge our great nation’s future. The slogan came to her in an instant, echoing in her mind as it had years ago, when even a journey of over one hundred light years had failed to mollify the booming speech of the Prime Minister, as it crept scratchily from the radiscreen, each syllable’s transmission a victory of its own. She remembered feeling proud to be one of the first. She remembered feeling lucky.

Behind her, the rusted gate fell with from its hinges with a pathetic clatter.

‘Shit,’ she breathed.

Rounding the corner, a crisp southerly wind caught her unawares, streaking her boots with rich emerald sand. The air had a peculiar quality to it that day, and she wondered what words she might use to describe it, were she ever to write a memoir, as she had often contemplated, of her time on Albion. Smiling wistfully, she shook her head. As she understood it, the old country seemed to have little interest in the colonists, save for their usefulness as a political tool to be clumsily brandished by bureaucrats secure in the assurance that Albion was far, far away and that they, of course, would never have to set foot on it.

In the town square, she came upon the statues of the heroes of the past, each worth several thousands, and each mercilessly vandalised. And not even the most officious servant of the bureau had bothered to clean it off.

What, they must have thought bitterly, is the point? The money has run out, the lights go out tonight, leaving us alone, like random pieces of flotsam, drifting into an unknown reality.

Presently, she came upon the grim facade of the Golden Lion. The pub’s entranceway, methodically recreated as it once existed on Earth, thrust itself obstinately into the street, an emphatic reminder to any passerby of its continued existence.

Its patrons fell near-exclusively into two groups. The first consisted of those newly arrived on Albion, who had not yet sampled the pub’s foul, neglected toilets, nor its equally rancid beers, which, after having been transported several light years, the local scientific contingent frequently speculated could hardly be described as alcoholic anymore. The second group, it only followed, were those that simply paid no mind to what could charitably be described as the Golden Lion’s unfortunate shortcomings – the melancholy old men with weary eyes, many of whom had been working in the harbours since colonisation began, who overlooked their dank, fetid surroundings and moribund drinks, as they had done for many years.

Today, however, with the lights mere hours from being shut off, the pub was busier. Many more than she expected sat, wanting, she supposed, to experience for one last time the macabre facsimile of prestige, of home, which had been carefully and expensively erected for them. The orange glow of manufactured sunlight, which streamed sporadically through the filthy windows, hit her eyes just then. Feeling them prick with tears, she turned on her heel and hurried back towards the harbour.

With her diving outfit in hand, she somewhat awkwardly accepted the compact, handheld mining equipment from Frederick, the grinning harbour master.

Behind his practised affability, however, she could see in his features the same anxiety gripping the rest of the populace. She concluded that he would soon be in the Golden Lion.

Squinting at the helmet before Frederick absentmindedly tossed it over her head, she could still just make out the words, once standard issue on all Albion diving-wear, that she had tried so hard to remove:

Through our glorious past we shall forge our great nation’s future.

Aged and worn, its letters barely readable, the writing disappeared, along with the helmet and the rest of Annabelle, beneath the cold violet waves. Angelic and poised, she adjusted her equipment for a final time and was gone.

by Martin Mullaney.