So now we have a quiet moment perhaps I can tell you what else I read on Gwen’s smartphone, as we sped south towards south-central Port Talbot in that tacsi on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The device was a wonder to behold: it patched into the local internet with a speed and efficiency I never could have imagined. It could sense your thoughts through your fingers, filling out search bars with text before you knew what you were thinking – a seamless fount of information. Plus it came in a nice colour.
The local interweb was full of details on Grandad. A whole industry of books, magazines and research papers offered themselves up to tell the story of his momentous life. It seemed over here he had got quite a lot done. I found a sober documentary covering the pertinent facts – Birth of a Nation: The Corporate State of Jones. It had grossed millions and won two Oscars. Best Film and Best Visual Effects, even though no CGI had been needed.
It explained this was not the only Golden Age this region had enjoyed. The first had been briefer and less intense, but back in Victorian times South Wales had been booming. The first Industrial Revolution rode on wheels of coal. Maybe the wheels were made of steel, but they were powered by coal, the original black gold. Places where it was available in abundance became cradles of new technology, white-hot blast furnaces of progress.
But not all coal was created equal. Some seams were more equal than others. The best coal, the hard stuff, which burnt brighter and hotter and drove the wheels of industry faster, could be found in only a few hallowed places – spots on Earth touched by the smouldering finger of the God of Hellfire. Which is to say, millions of years beforehand a bunch of ancient trees rotted in just the right way. One such fortunate location was South Wales. This magical stuff was called anthracite, the crack cocaine of coal.
While it lasted it was glorious. Great men made their fortunes in the crucible of the new industries, iron and coal at their heart. Tens of thousands of workers flooded in; boom towns boomed; there were jobs and money aplenty. It might have been dark and satanic, underneath the hills, but it was better than starving to death on a farm – which had been the main form of employment up until then. The coal poured out, to drive the pistons of the world’s great railway expansion, and to power the boilers of the dreadnoughts of the Royal Navy, the global policemen of the day.
But like all Golden Ages it couldn’t last. The easy coal near the surface ran out. The coal masters took their profits and moved to Hampstead. Other fuels proved easier and cleaner to work with. Oil was the new kid in town; it slid in and nicked the best parking spots. The miners all got nasty coughs. Smoke got in their eyes, and their weeping washed tracks of sorrow down their blackened, chiselled faces. It was a moment lost in time, like tears in the rain. I think Rutger Hauer did the voiceover.
The film went on to document the sad fate of the region. South Wales did not do well in the later twentieth century. The legacy industries struggling to compete, the chronic lack of investment. The strikes, the closures, the call centres. It was a tale familiar to me – I had lived through the arse end of it. But then came the point of departure, and it came with a recognisable face.
Grandad was portrayed in this slick piece of corporate PR as your standard wild-haired boffin, straight out of central casting. It didn’t tally with the man I knew and loved, but it was close enough – no denying it was him. What was so different over here to result in such divergent outcomes? A question for another day, perhaps. The documentary went on to discuss Isaiah’s invention itself.
Unless you had a PhD in integrated field dynamics you wouldn’t even grasp the terminology, and even then it sounded like some serious pseudoscience woo. Put simply, and for most people it could be put no other way, the J-Drive was an infinite energy source in a box. Anthracite v2.0 required no input, no fuel, just turn it on and get the electrical power of a small star, without the heat and pesky radiation. A happy side effect, with a few configuration tweaks, was an anti-gravity field. No one knew for sure, but it seemed to mess with the fabric of reality, bending it creaking to a new will. There were rumours of even more esoteric secondary effects (the gates?), but such was the rush to make use of so useful an invention few stopped to question the theory. Humanity found world-changing uses for the J-Drive aplenty.
Significantly, Isaiah Jones never patented his device. When you file a patent you have to describe what makes your process unique – give away its secret so it can be protected by law, to the poor extent it can. Isaiah trusted in the obscurity of his methods more than he trusted in lawyers. Time would more than prove him right.
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Vested interests formed a disorderly queue to buy him out. Oil companies and car giants offered billions for his research. Tesla and Microsoft offered him a seat on the board, even the table itself. Saudi Arabia put a fatwah on his head, claiming he peddled in witchcraft. But Isaiah rose above it all. He stuck to his guns, and to his all-conquering invention – the little black box that could.
The Powers That Be weren’t about to take this shafting lying down. MIT tasked a top-level research team to reverse-engineer one of the first production examples – to get under its hood and learn what made it tick. They set to work unscrewing the chunky bolts. Their results were a less than resounding success.
When the first emergency responders felt safe enough to approach the crater they found no sign of the research team, nor most of the Harvard campus. Of the J-Drive itself there was just the mangled empty case, smouldering and humming quietly with an ethereal turquoise glow. These things were tough, if not indestructible.
After that people just accepted what they’d been given – the greatest gift horse ever presented to mankind, so why punch it in the mouth? J-Drives were cheap, they were plentiful, and they solved so many problems. Pollution and fuel poverty became things of the past. Travel became cheaper and faster than ever before. OPEC was told to take a long walk off a short pier into the Persian Gulf. Splash.
Of course the Jones family became immensely rich. Isaiah brought in his extended clan to help him run the show and built a massive mansion in the hills. He was no fan of the Welsh curse of nepotism, but events unfolded at such pace he had little choice. The family proved to have a head for business, providing the ruthless streak Isaiah lacked. The Corporation controlled all production and never sold shares, the most private of private companies. Security around the final stage of manufacture was eye-wateringly tight, limited to Isaiah’s laboratory deep under the Port Talbot factory. Not a single J-Drive left the dustless halls without first receiving his personal seal of approval, some said a squirt of his special sauce.
Research continued at YIT. – the Ystradgynlais Institute of Technology, the foremost engineering university on the planet, set up with funds bequeathed by Isaiah. But it was all applied research – practical uses rather than theory. Despite his modesty Isaiah paid for a nice statue outside the front steps. He had liberated humanity almost overnight; few begrudged him his billions. Isaiah continued to focus on production, while the natural-born hustlers in his family grew the empire. Weyland-Yutani was gobbled up in a leveraged buyout, The Tyrell Corporation consumed so fast its synthetic feet didn’t touch the floor. Soon J-Corp owned half the world.
The Revolution came next. With all the money flooding into Wales and all the new-found power flooding out (in every sense), there was no way the political status quo could hold sway. Scotland was already long gone and London a virtual city state. The UK splintered into chaos and its economy imploded, creating a leadership vacuum men of action were destined to fill. J-Corp joined forces with the Welsh Rugby Union to declare the First Republic. Resistance from what was left of the British state was futile. On the fifth day the elite Barry John Armoured Division reached Westminster and the War of Independence was over. Roadblocks and AT mines had little use against hover tanks. The underdog had turned out to be an underdragon. Nothing would be the same again.
When Isaiah passed away, well into his nineties, he was lauded as a secular saint – a genius inventor, liberator of mankind, and hero of the Revolution to boot. As per his last wish, his remains were loaded on board The Prince Madog, the first J-Drive colony ship, and blasted off towards Alpha Centauri. The colonists planned to build him a shrine. With him lacking direct heirs of his own, control of the Jones Corporation passed to his nephew, Genghis ‘Can’ Jones, who as usual no doubt would. By the sound of it the local version was much like the one I knew on steroids. The mere mention of his name sent a shiver down my spine. The sight of his gap-toothed grin brought me out in a cold sweat. Thoughts of vaginal steamers had me squirming in my seat. At least in the pictures he was wearing a better suit.
The documentary caught up to the ‘present’, which seemed to be a dozen years ahead of where we were (where we when?) back home. Colour me confused. But however you want to slice it, say ‘hiya’ to the new undisputed global hegemon – The Welsh Republic – powerful and prosperous like no nation which had gone before. An empire on which, if the sun ever set, none would notice thanks to the phosphorescent glow. Nominally an egalitarian democracy, in practice a juggernaut corporate state. Every president since independence also sat on the Jones Corporation Board. Some said Wales was no better than a benign dictatorship – which worked, as long as you could keep finding benign dictators.
The film closed with an eye to the future, hinting at tantalising new uses peeking over the event horizon for the ubiquitous J-Drive. Functions so outlandish they made what had gone before seem mundane. I guessed the gate technology would not stay secret for long. The future was bright, the future was Anthracite.