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Jack Smith and Vicky Truva sat at the east entrance to the barn, each leaning against one of the sentry-like trees, where barn doors had once closed. They faced each other, stretched out on the moist earth, legs side by side. Although it had rained heavily, the combination of overhanging foliage and the end of the barn roof had restricted the amount of water landing between the trees. The ground was damp, but not muddy.

Jack saw Vicky touch the ground with her flat hand before she sat down. He had worked indoors for so many years that she had to explain to him that she was checking whether it would dirty her beige cotton trousers.

Vicky’s lantern, placed beside them, created a cone of light that emerged through the large doorway and between the trees and then faded across the large field. There it merged with the light coming from the heavily gibbous moon, which had come up a little before sunset. The giant, orange harvest moon would emerge the next day at sunset.

The silhouettes of several giant stick men stretching six skipping ropes each led Jack’s gaze away over the countryside. The metal pylons and cables of the pre-Malthus electricity network remained standing against the elements.

Vicky interlaced her fingers across her chest and leaned back against the tree trunk behind her. ‘It seems like you’re going to take us back to the Times of Malthus.’ She moved to her left. Jack could see her wiggling slightly to make a ridge in the bark more comfortable against her spine.

He had not yet told her that he was responsible for the explosion that had destroyed the audiopt and armulet connections. Jack narrowed his eyes slightly and moved his face barely ten degrees to the side. ‘Do you know the history of the Times? Are you sure you really mean that?’

She shrugged without moving her hands. ‘Everybody learns it as a child. But it was more than fifty years ago, I’m not sure anyone really understands it all now.’ She leant her head back and used the pile of her nut-brown hair as a pillow against the tree.

‘My grandmother lived through it all. She told me detailed stories when I was a young boy of how life had been before, during and after them. I still can’t believe how radically the world was changed, but I’ve looked up loads of history during my time as a sifter. Hers was obviously just one story, but the whole essence of it is absolutely true. You really have to study a lot to be able to get an understanding of how people lived before 2030.’

Vicky stared away, across the clearing. ‘Like what?’

‘Well, I’ve watched a lot of the videostories from back then. Sometimes crazy, outlandish, imaginary things; sometimes fictional stories that could have been real but just happened not to be. Plus, a lot of news and history, real-life things. It takes a lot of time to watch enough of them to understand life in Elizabethan times, but they give you the context to see how all the wars could have come about. It’s pretty hard to think about why people would have fought so much, unless you understand how overpopulated the world was, and how all the food and other things were unequally shared out.’

‘Is that what Hitler was trying to do? Reduce the population so there was less pressure on things?’

‘Um, I’m not sure — I haven’t really studied much history from before when Grannie Ellie was born.’

‘When was that?’

‘2000.’

Vicky’s hazel eyes focussed on Jack’s face. She spoke evenly. ‘OK, tell me how things went from then. Help me to understand what you’re trying to achieve.’ She closed her eyes.

Jack the sifter shifted on the stone slab he had as a seat. ‘Um, OK. Let me see. When my grandmother was a young girl, she lived in a town with a quarter of a million people in it. And that was a relatively small town. London had seven million, and there were some places in the world where twenty million people tried to live together within a few square miles. Many people living right next to each other were strangers. This made them wary of their neighbours, and often people were jealous of each other.

‘Food had to be brought from the regions where it was grown into the cities, and the amount of things that were made for the city people far exceeded what they actually produced in those huge populations.

‘The people in the cities then had to have a way to pay for it all. This meant there were whole economies based on trading only. Nothing was actually produced, things were just transacted. Money was everything. And because people never saw what was needed to grow and transport the food, or to get the materials for manufacturing, it made making comparisons of the value of different things impossible.

‘And that was compounded by everybody living so closely packed together. Every moment, the men and women, even the children, would be comparing themselves against each other to see who was best. And the ones who had most things, or the rarest foods, or the largest items, were considered the best. That’s where the envy came from.’

She had separated her hands. The left remained on her bosom, and the right index finger was slowly twisting up her hair. Her head leaned a little towards the finger like a cat towards a stroke.

‘Now, remember there were no audiopt feeds then. They were invented in about, um, 2035. So, those people with more money or power were able to manipulate things so that they got even more money and power.’

Without opening her eyes, Vicky interrupted. Her lips barely parted to ask, ‘How could they manipulate things?’

‘That’s why I mentioned the audiopt feeds. In those days, it was much harder to find things out about other people. This meant that they could cheat each other, or not tell the truth, or hurt people, and you couldn’t find out who had done it. Or often, you wouldn’t even know what had been done.’ She scowled a little.

Jack went on, ‘So the rich and powerful could manipulate everything so that they got even more money and power, but without you really knowing that it was going on. Now, how that worked out in the end, meant that a few people had virtually everything, and the vast majority of the world’s population had virtually nothing. Eventually to the point that they didn’t have even enough food and water.

‘Towards the end of the twentieth century, many people in the world had too much food. But that then went completely the other way. My grandparents got married in 2027, and by then, food was so expensive all over the world that many of those city dwellers were very hungry. The way economics worked at the time allowed, or even encouraged, large farms — and I mean enormous, the size of several Kangaroos — to be the only producers of food, and they charged much more for the food than was necessary. A continuously increasing world population, it was nearly eight and a half billion people by 2027, combined with the change in climate, which caused a lot of crops to fail, exacerbated the food problems.

Vicky asked, ‘Why didn’t people grow their own food?’

‘Most people didn’t know how to grow their own food, or even where to go to find land to use to try and grow it.’

She gave an unbelieving look.

‘Hunger is a powerful thing, and desperate people will do anything. Eventually, they went on the rampage, killing the neighbours they hadn’t known. This was the start of the Times.

‘Early this century, communications expanded suddenly. The Bitness Revelations showed the poor and oppressed how the rich had been cheating them for so long. There was a series of publications of dealings that governments and corporations had wanted to keep secret.’

‘Hold on.’ Her hazel eyes were bright and eager. ‘What’s a corporation?’

He smiled back at her. ‘OK, sorry. You’re happy with the idea of a government, yes?’

‘Yes: a Kangaroo but before the Covenants of Jerusalem, so one that breaks the mass influence Covenant, right? A group of people leading a really large population, like all of England having only one Kangaroo to decide on all matters for the whole land.’

‘Yes, exactly. So, a corporation is a similar kind of mass influence organisation but for making and selling things. But all the people making things got very little in return for their work. All the benefit went to a powerful few. Those powerful few controlled the lives of thousands and usually did not act for the benefit of all. These corporations were the main reason for the Fifth Covenant, so there could never be elite controllers again.’

Vicky was smiling. She had moved her hands into her lap, one still holding the other. ‘And what about their secrets? I can see that it would be possible without the audiopt feeds, but why would you?’

He raised his eyebrows and stayed silent for a whole minute. She stared back at him, defying the unspoken challenge to speak. ‘Sometimes a few people would know a secret together, but it’s basically a thing only a few people knew, and others couldn’t find out, unless one of those who knew about it told them. People’s lives were better when they could have some memories or knowledge that were for them only. But the corporations used secrecy to stop people discovering how they were being exploited. With the Fifth Covenant, there’s no motivation, or chance really, to exploit people. Thus we don’t need the First Covenant. The First and the Fifth both serve to generate the same ends.’ Jack gave a beaming smile.

‘How strange.’

‘When you study as much history as I have, it’s amazing how many different types of society you find that humans have lived through. But the Times of Malthus was the first crisis truly to affect everyone on the planet. We’ve all seen the videostories of the huge piles of burning corpses. Everyone lost people, it had to stop.’

‘So has life been just the same, continuously, ever since the Times?’

‘The arrival of the audiopts opened the eyes of those who would be bandits and raiders to the fact that the Times were over. They could follow a simple life path and always have enough to eat and drink and easily protect their families. Codifying and securing this newfound safe existence was paramount. The new way of life, emerging from the shadow of the Times of Malthus, led to the signing of the Covenants of Jerusalem.’

Vicky sat up, aligning her spine close to the tree trunk again. ‘OK, that is more detail about history than I remember ever reading before, thank you. But, I ask again: what will be achieved by taking away that audiopt security?’

Jack turned his head to look across the field following the cone of light. He had not attempted to deny his involvement in the destruction of the audiopts, and she had not directly accused him.

The moonlight gave the wider landscape a dim brightness. Through a thin screen of trees, he could see into another narrow field, which was then bounded by the river, with a steep bank up its far side. His eyes traced along the contour of that bank moving to the left, away from Vicky, as far as he could make it out. Finally, the trees became thicker and he could only see forest. Without turning back to her, he answered, ‘This isn’t the same world as fifty years ago. Everyone now has grown up in peace. We know how abundant food and other things are, so there’s no need to cheat or steal. And it’s unnatural for people to be unable to have privacy.’

‘What’s “privacy”?’ Vicky questioned.

Her eyes had not left his face, and he now turned so that they were looking directly at each other. Jack’s expression lifted, with a slight smirk. ‘Exactly.’

Vicky’s hand went instinctively to her armulet. She had only touched the screen two times when she stopped and looked at him.

He was still staring straight at her. ‘It’s a very powerful thing. It’s also the way humans lived during our entire existence, except for the last fifty years. And there were plenty of peaceful times before that.’

Vicky lowered her arm and held his gaze. ‘Tell me a secret,’ she requested.

Jack smiled, tapped her on the leg and stood up, shaking his own legs into action. ‘Maybe one day.’

‘Maybe tomorrow?’

‘Maybe.’ They stood facing each other. To depart, Vicky needed to head around the building and back to her house. It had already been dark for over four hours. Jack needed to go inside the barn and gather his belongings to set off. Neither one moved. ‘But I’m leaving now, so if you want me to tell you a secret tomorrow, you’ll have to come with me.’

‘Where will you go?’ Little of the lantern light illuminated Vicky as her back was towards it. Jack surveyed her face, the moonlight dappling through the leaves overhead. Her question had implied that she expected he would not be returning to Cheltenham and back to work at the Doughnut. The darkness made her features inscrutable.

‘I’m going to the old bunker at Leckhampton Hill. Have you heard of it?’ He could make out the shaking of her silhouetted head. ‘Well, your armulet can’t help you with finding that any more, so come with me.’

She continued shaking her head. ‘Jack, I can’t just up and leave the farm on a helter-skelter trip across the countryside with you.’

‘You can do anything you want.’

‘Sorry.’ He couldn’t tell if she was actually apologising, or merely explaining that she had initially misrepresented herself. ‘I don’t want to leave the farm and come on some helter-skelter trip across the countryside with you.’

Jack shook a little, a shudder that travelled right down his body. He took a deep breath. ‘I understand.’ He held her hand, with her twisted little finger escaping sideways in the darkness. ‘I trust you, Vicky.’ There was a moment of silence; she picked up the lantern and walked away towards a field of waist-high, sparsely planted wheat.