After escaping the carnage in Aberdare we sped south through the darkening sky. The passenger hold of the tacsi was cramped but comfortable enough. A sign inside the windscreen advised clients a cleaning surcharge would apply on any vomit. Gwen said she had cash to pay for chaff and flares, but didn’t want to attract undue attention. She judged stealth mode an extravagance, unlikely to help against sophisticated opponents. What the hell sort of taxi was this? My companion seemed content our shenanigans with the phone had thrown off pursuit, at least for the time being. My stress levels eased a little, and I began to almost enjoy the ride. Gwen set the terrain-following altimeter to a conservative 500 feet of ground clearance and took the opportunity to field-strip her gun.

‘There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old bold pilots,’ she said, by way of explanation.

I heartily approved. ‘My Grandad is always saying stuff like that. He was in the Air Force you know.’

After locking her weapon back together Gwen checked the radar for signs of pursuit. ‘That’s nice. We can go back and get him if you like.’

‘Very funny. Isaiah the Flyer, they used to call him. Qualified on Spitfires, he did. Served as an engineer mostly after that.’

No answer broke the awkward silence. I noticed Gwen giving me a strange look. In the short time I’d known her it was the first time I’d seen her thrown by anything we’d seen or done. It didn’t fill me with confidence.

All of a sudden she was doing too much blinking. ‘Your grandfather was named… Isaiah?’

‘Yes.’

‘And your family name is… Jones?’

‘You already know that – from the real Aberdare. Aberdare Zero, as I’ve decided to call it.’ I half expected a debate about which was the real Aberdare, but she seemed distracted. My stress-ometer began to twitch.

‘And he was in the RAF?’

‘Yes, in World War Two, at least. Left soon after – didn’t think much of jets.’ I didn’t like the way Gwen was looking at me; she was starting to make me nervous, which considering what I’d just lived through was quite an achievement.

I felt I was missing something. ‘You don’t know him, do you?’

Such a long pause followed it seemed she might not answer. I could almost hear the gears turning behind those bottomless dark eyes. At last Gwen shook herself out of her daze and made an effort to compose herself.

‘I won’t lie to you – I don’t exactly know him, but I do know of him – the local version at least.’

‘What do you mean? He’s not famous or anything.’

Gwen studied me closely, as if gauging if I was extracting the urine. She was starting to freak me out. ‘Perhaps you need to learn a little about the Isaiah Jones from this world – the real Isaiah Jones. The one who gave his name to the J-Drive.’

I was getting a bad feeling about this. ‘You what?’

Gwen licked her lips and took a slow, deep breath. ‘Maybe the most famous man who ever lived. That Isaiah Jones.’

‘My grandfather?’

‘I don’t know about grandfathers, but Isaiah Jones was the last of the old-school inventors – Edison meets Tesla, but on a good day. Isaiah was the real thing – a certified genius. Working on the weeping edge of anything he turned his hand to, but his real passion was zero-point energy.’

I must have looked blank – perhaps even more vacant than usual.

She continued slowly, ‘Zero-point energy is getting power from a vacuum.’

I couldn’t help but scoff. ‘I’m no scientist, more your tortured creative genius type, but even I know you can’t get more out of an engine than you put in.’

‘Zero-point is different. It pulls free energy from the very fabric of space – the Holy Grail of quantum physics since before Schrödinger murdered his first cat.’

I was still sceptical. Grandad had been good, he’d built me some great soapbox go-carts and epic Thunderbirds dioramas, but this was seriously out of his range. Yet inconveniently the huge ore freighters filling the surrounding sky required some explanation.

Gwen went on. ‘Isaiah wasn’t just a theoretical physicist, he was an engineer. As soon as he had thrashed out the theory, some claim scribbled on the back of a fag packet, he retired to his shed and hammered away. He got an account at B&Q.’

I had to admit this sounded like my grandad, but I still wasn’t buying it. ‘This can’t be happening, I feel faint. This can’t be an alternative universe. I must have taken a bang to the head.’

Gwen looked unimpressed. ‘Would a pi test convince you?’ She seemed even less impressed by my blank expression. ‘The ratio of the diameter of a circle to its circumference. One of the constants that varies from universe to universe due to fluctuations in the shape of space-time. Course, you need plenty of significant figures to spot a change. Look at this.’

She tapped away on her smartphone and showed me a long string of glowing numbers. 3.14159265357…

‘I’ve got an app for it – very precise. Comes in handy in my line of work – like a compass, or a GPS.’

I still wasn’t convinced. ‘Like I said, I’m not much of a mathematician, you’d need Grandad for that. I wouldn’t know pi if it bit my bum. You’ll have to come up with something better than that.’

Gwen gritted her perfect teeth and seemed to count under her breath. She thought for a moment, before reaching into her jacket to produce a thick wad of cash, handing me a bright orange bill. It looked like Monopoly money on crack, or maybe I’d been slipped some LSD. ‘This is a hundred dragon note – currency of the Welsh Republic and legal tender in most of the civilised world, even in what’s left of England. Recognise the guy on the back?’

I flipped it over, and stifled a gasp. Sure enough, there was Gramps, smiling back at me and brandishing a slide rule. He was pictured sitting at a drawing board packed full of bewildering schematics and plans. The inscription woven around the banknote, in elaborate Celtic scrollwork, read, ‘National Bank of Wales – In Isaiah Jones we trust. Pay It Forward.’

I was experiencing a horrible sinking feeling, and for once it had nothing to do with cocktails or kamikaze lifts. It wasn’t just the image of Gramps – the inclusion of one of his pet phrases gave the whole nightmare a bizarre air of believability. Gwen saw my expression and brightened. ‘Good to see I’m getting through to you, sport. You’ve got a lot of catching up to do. Best I fill you in.’

‘Please don’t hit me!’

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Exasperated, she just shook her head in contempt. When I’d finally calmed down, Gwen got on with her story. For no good reason I could think of she’d taken to speaking in hushed tones.

‘You’ve got to understand, this is the corporate PR version. I’m sure reality was messier, but after years of trials and false dawns Isaiah produced the first prototype. The Jones Drive Mark 1 was born – he codenamed it ANTHRACITE.’

‘He built it in his shed?’

Gwen wrinkled her nose. ‘Technically, yes. But by this stage he had employees – it was basically a small factory. From day one these things were so good he sold them straight off the production line. The world rolled up to his doors with wads of cash, and flew away powered by J-Drives laughing their heads off. Civilisation was transformed overnight.’

This wasn’t easy to accept, but neither were the wonders I’d witnessed back in Aberdare, before being almost obliterated. Could a single leap in technology ripple out through so many fields? I was being asked to think the unthinkable, at a time when most guys would have struggled to think the thinkable. Lucky I’m not most guys. But still my brain was numb. ‘So how do the gates fit in?’

Gwen tapped away at her handheld and looked worried. ‘Oh they came much later, and that tech is still hush-hush. Just a few groups know the trick of rigging J-Drives in parallel to hack yourself a stable portal. My employers control the most extensive network.’ She saw my expression. ‘Still having a hard time believing me? Take a look.’

She handed me her smartphone. It showed a picture of Grandad in pristine lab coat, standing proudly in front of a gleaming factory. The headline above it read ‘Modern Anthracite Solves World Power Needs’. Gramps looked thirty years younger, but there was no denying it was him. Behind Isaiah stood a gaggle of faces I recognised from home – uncles and aunts aplenty, all of them benefitting from a significant wardrobe upgrade, and in several cases, plastic surgery. Grandad was being handed a huge medal by a guy in a suit. The caption said it was the UN Secretary-General. The medal was the Nobel Prize for Physics and Peace, combined for one year only. I began feeling a bit faint.

‘One from the archive, but that factory is still the biggest. We should catch sight of it in a jiffy. They say you can see it from space.’

I had a lot of reading to do. It wasn’t going to be easy, not with the way my hands were trembling.

* * * *

Before I tell you what else I learned that fateful day, perhaps my family tree needs a little explanation – some might say a little pruning. My grandad Isaiah was the youngest of five brothers, from an early age held up as a paragon by his parents to which the others could only aspire. By all accounts they struggled to reach the mark. Can’t have been easy in depression era South Wales. Times were hard. Often there wasn’t enough to eat. A favoured child would only cause resentment in such situations, no matter how great they did at school.

The oldest was Nebuchadnezzar (I’m hoping his mates called him Neb.) I know what you’re thinking – the names. Long ago some long-forgotten Jones family forbearer concluded that when you have a surname as egalitarian as ours, you need some another way to stand out. Perhaps they went a bit too far, but it soon became a family tradition.

Neb was as different from Isaiah as could be, as were all the other brothers. While Grandad was diligent and studious, his older rivals were coarse and mean, hustling the weaker kid’s dinner money and blackmailing the teachers. His parents packed Isaiah off to Air Force Academy at eighteen – about as close, in that time and place, as any could get to a seat of higher learning. University was a distant dream.

Years passed. Roles were played in the momentous events of the day. Somehow all the brothers conspired to avoid getting torpedoed, bombed, shot or blitzed by Hitler’s panzers. Some had better wars than others. At least one got locked up for selling ration books off the back of a lorry. Grandad came back in one piece, but changed – scarred by the things he’d seen and done. He was also deeply convinced of everyone’s duty to leave the world a better place than they’d found it. Plenty of his peers didn’t make it back at all.

But for all their faults Isaiah’s older brothers were also fertile to an alarming degree. Balthazar, Ezekiel and Herod might not have left much of a mark on the world but they left it populated with a horde of useless bastards – in every sense. Theirs was the DNA which launched a thousand shits. Neb’s shady intrigues finally proved his undoing, falling off a boat running fags and booze to the monks on Caldey Island. Any passing sharks likely had chunks bitten out of them on his way down.

Meanwhile his relatives kept up the naming tradition. But the biblical theme proved restrictive. They started going off piste while, it seems, marching off pissed to the registry office. These weren’t proto-hipsters – this was provincial Wales, where the 60s didn’t start till 1982. This was decades before celebrity baby name inflation. But woe betide any who mocked this growing clan. Some families have one bad apple, mine was a whole festering orchard. After Grandad and Mum I was the lone snowy white lamb amongst a whole flock of black sheep. They were small town criminals; gangsters straight outta Trumpton. But no one laughed if they wanted to keep their teeth.

Neb’s eldest, my mum’s cousin, was the notorious ‘Uncle Genghis’, uncle to everyone, whether they liked it or not. He was a chip off Neb’s flinty old granite block, but twice as mean; and much like his Mongolian namesake a deranged psychopath to boot. He’d played openside for Pontypridd until getting banned for life for headbutting a referee. Rumour was the fool made some joke about a yak. As far as I was aware Genghis had never laid waste to the Greater Middle East, but I wouldn’t have put it past him – it was surely only a matter of time. He was a ‘local businessman’, in the Sicilian sense; of limited talent but limitless ambition, forever touting get-rich-quick schemes, long cons and short sells. He had his fingers in lots of pies, none of which would have got past environmental health – not until the inspector fell down some stairs.

‘Genghis Can’ as the saying went round our way. And in the end he probably would. He scared me to death growing up, and his kids Pryderi and Blodeuwedd were even worse. Family gatherings would end in smashed toys and bruises, sometimes broken bones. Unfortunately for me he seemed to be always round our house when I was growing up – he was very close to my mum.

I vividly remembered the last time I’d seen Uncle Genghis – he’d come round to borrow Mum’s foot spa. He had a theory, for once maybe somewhere near the mark, that millions of these things were gathering dust in cupboards all over the world. Why not turn these unwanted gifts into something useful, something people would pay for? So Genghis proposed a kit to repurpose them as vaginal steamers – the Vaginator 5000 was born. Uncle wanted to utilise my design skills, free of charge, of course, to draw up the plans. They say there’s a cigarette paper between genius and insanity, so I told him in no uncertain terms on which side this idea fell – for this reason I was ‘ooout’. He told me to shut my cakehole and fetch my mam. I was lucky to escape another beating.

And then of course there was my own beloved mother. She was intelligent enough, but sometimes a smidge out of touch. For example, all that summer she’d been fretting about Genghis’s kids’ inevitable descent into a life of crime. It was obvious to the rest of us where that crude brood were heading, but somehow Mum still held out hope they’d better themselves, just like I’d done.

‘They say young Pryderi is one of those medicine donkeys.’

Not for the first time I squinted at her in confusion. ‘A what, Mum?’

‘Been breaking bad with that Harri Heroin round the back of the Youth Club, helping ’im out like. You know – a medicine donkey.’

My tired brain struggled to translate, I stared at her in wonder. ‘Mum, do you mean a drugs mule?’

‘Yeeeeees, that’s what I was bleedin saying. Pass us the milk.’

We seemed to have lots of conversations like this. It was almost enough to make we want to leave home. Almost.

So the upshot of all this was, despite being a sensitive and sheltered only child, I was beset by a plague of relatives every bit as egregious as anything Moses had to put up with. And I don’t mean my third cousin Moses (aka ‘Jones the Cones’), who ruled the ice cream trade in Tenby with a nut-sprinkled rod of iron. My family were the Borgias without the charity, the Mansons without the music. It’s a miracle I turned out as normal as I did.

I told Gwen all this as we sped along through the darkening sky. She looked at me sadly, as if a horrible realisation was dawning. By the end of my tale she held her head in her hands. After an uncomfortable silence she began massaging her temples, as if beset by an avalanche of woe.

‘And yet, they chose to call you… Kevin?’

This, I had to admit, was a good point. ‘Mum always liked to think we were a breed apart from the rest of the clan –’

‘Yeah, who calls their mam Mum, the Duke of Twatshire?’

‘Maybe she just saw me and thought, that’s a Kevin, that is. At least I don’t sound like I massacre newborn babies for fun.’

‘No, I’m sure you wouldn’t do anything so memorable.’

It was then that the thought hit me. You’re likely wondering why I hadn’t occurred to me sooner, but it had been quite a bad day – I had reason to be distracted. If there were analogues of all my family over here, merrily counting their money and running this world, where was the local version of me? Gwen got there before I did. I’ve got to hand it to here, she was fast in more ways than one. My new friend passed me her handheld again.

‘Sorry kiddo, I’ve already checked. No dice.’

The screen was small, but glowed with breathtaking clarity. It showed my family’s extensive Wikipedia entry. A small footnote at the bottom caught my attention.

Isaiah Jones was unable to have children of his own due to injuries sustained in World War Two. He died without a direct heir.

It seemed I wouldn’t be meeting my twin any time soon.