Prisioners Read online

  PRISONERS

  Terry Morgan

  Copyright © 2019 Terry Morgan

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by TJM Books.

  Website: www.tjmbooks.com

  The right of Terry Morgan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Author’s Introduction:

  Before you begin reading this or are instantly put off by a few graphs and pie charts, please remember this is a novel. It is about the effect of human overpopulation on a young man living in an overcrowded and increasingly troubled mega city in the year 2050 and of his meeting with his uncle, a University Professor of Biology. The Professor, a long-term advocate of pro-active human population control, is serving a sentence in an open prison related to his strong, some might say extremist, beliefs.

  No-one can forecast with any accuracy what the world will be like for young people in thirty years’ time. If anything, the story is meant as a warning and if it touches a nerve and leads to serious global discussion on a solution to overpopulation it will have served its purpose. Overpopulation is, after all, the cause of most modern human problems from climate change, environmental damage and loss of wildlife to conflict and mass migration, though the connection is rarely made for reasons which one can only assume are sensitivities about the subject and a total lack of viable and morally acceptable solutions. However, as the Professor says throughout, to have ignored the connection and not to act is a failure of political leadership.

  Prisoners is an updated and revised version of my previous novel, ‘The Cage’, with statistics and images available in 2019.

  I am extremely grateful to my biologist friend, Doctor Alex Waller, for his comments and advice and to UK-based organisation Population Matters for the use of some statistics and comments. www.populationmatters.org

  If the continued growth of the human population disturbs you, I would recommend supporting Population Matters in its ongoing efforts to highlight the problem.

  “Too many people living in unsustainable affluence is at the heart of our problem. We need a system which recognises that the untrammelled consumption and environmental recklessness of the rich world cannot continue, meaning those of us who live there now need to radically change the way we live (including choosing small families). We also need a system that recognises that making more people affluent by translocating them in their hundreds of millions from poverty to the same unsustainable lifestyles already enjoyed by too many spells disaster.”

  (Population Matters, December 2018)

  Personal comment:

  It took humanity 200,000 years to reach one billion people and only 200 years to reach seven billion. We are still adding an extra 80 million each year and are headed towards 10 billion by mid-century. Believe it or not, for those of us who’ve been around a while, this sudden increase in numbers of people in just ffty years is very noticeable. It partly explains why I now live in rural Thailand!

  PRISONERS

  "You've got a visitor, Professor. It’s a young man who says you won’t recognise him."

  The pale, elderly, grey-haired man in the black prison tee shirt, had been sitting, deep in concentration, staring at the flat screen on the wall of his small cell when Sam McIlroy knocked and entered. He looked up.

  "If it’s another young media upstart wanting to write a piece of pure fantasy about me turn them away, Sam.”

  “It’s not one of those, Professor. He’s too young. He says he’s your nephew.”

  Superintendent Sam McIlroy, in his grey uniform and single row of colourful ribbons jangled the keys hanging from his belt and rested a friendly hand on the old man’s shoulder. “That’ll be a first, won’t it? A family visitor?”

  "Does he have a name?”

  “His name is Carl.”

  The Professor removed his glasses, thought for a moment and then nodded. “I remember Carl. I’ve not seen him since he was a toddler. He must be, what, eighteen or nineteen now?"

  “Around that age I would say.” Sam grinned. “Nevertheless, he looks respectable.”

  The Professor sighed. “One from the loins of my young foster brother, Stefan. I lost count of all the others he was alleged to have spawned and abandoned over the years.” He paused. “A huge disappointment to my mother who adopted him, Sam. After my father’s death she tried very hard to help him make something of himself. His biological mother was an addict, a Russian immigrant but my mother thought she saw something in Stefan worth saving. It was all to no avail.”

  “I didn’t know that, Professor.”

  “Procreation without responsibility, Sam. Our greatest weakness.”

  After three years at Forest Hills Open Prison, Sam McIlroy knew this prisoner well but he would often spring new surprises.

  The Professor, as he’d always called him, was hardly a danger, though. Over the months, they had talked for hours either in the cell or during walks around the prison grounds. Whatever the weather, eleven fifteen was the time Sam would turn up outside Cell 36 to find the Professor ready and waiting. “Cold and raining again, Professor,” he might say. “Put a sweater on. I’ve brought you a plastic raincoat. You’ll look lovely with the hood up.”

  And the normally intense and serious seventy-five-year-old prisoner and ex-Cambridge University Professor of Biology would smile, find his old, grey sweater and follow Sam to the side gate. There, they might just stand, breathe the less sanitised air, watch the rain or, on brighter, drier days, stroll beside the perimeter fence. They often walked in silence because the Professor rarely talked these days. The other prisoners found him too serious but, when he did speak, Sam would always listen and nod and try to understand.

  As for other, uninvited visitors, he would refuse to meet journalists or anyone else seeking interviews. “Why should I meet them?” he’d say. They wouldn’t dare write something that agrees with me for fear of losing their job.”

  Indeed, the evidence was all around.

  Restating his old warnings that trying to reverse the nebulous matters of climate change and CO2 levels without addressing the fundamental cause of it all, human overpopulation, had become pointless. It was the never-ending problem of economic migration and refugees, of worldwide unemployment, urban violence and social breakdown that had become the new talking point. And who had warned that overpopulation would also be the cause of that?

  There were a few who had understood and still had the courage to whisper, “He was right, you know,” and history might one day show Professor Harry H. Richardson in a quite different light. Meanwhile, though, his character was set in stone.

  Harry Richardson had been an outspoken and unwelcome critic of politicians, religious leaders and many other high-profile attendees especially those at international conferences who said their bit for the cameras and then departed. To many of them he was an extremist and best ignored. That he had then committed a crime and was locked up, out of sight and out of mind, could not have been more welcome.

  The morning was cold and grey and as Sam waited for the Professor to pull on his sweater, he cleared a space amongst the clutter of books and papers on the table, leaned on it and peered at the screen on the wall. “What’s all this then, Professor?”

  "Statistics.”

  It was always statistics, tables, graphs and pie charts with the Professor.

  “South American human population growth from 2000 to now, 2050,” the Professor
went on. He pointed at the screen. “The green line shows what the numbers might have looked like had they listened and acted and not ignored the facts. We had passed self-sustainability long before even I was born but there was still some lingering hope back then.”

  The Professor used words like sustainability a lot and Sam now understood its meaning. He lifted his glasses onto his nose and looked more closely. “So, in 2020 it was 436 million but now it’s 507 million. Is that right?”

  “Correct, though it excludes Mexico which would add another 165 million of course. The point is it could have stabilised around 400 million. That was still unsustainable but we might still have had some wildlife and forest left and more jobs and a better quality of life for the poor majority.” He tugged on his sweater. “And don’t forget, Sam, that several million left their birthplaces and migrated north after the troubles. History tells of the tragedies that occurred when millions were turned away.”

  Sam shook his head. “You’re depressing me again, Professor.”

  “My apologies, Sam, but you’re a good listener.”

  “Well turn the darned thing off and come and meet your nephew. Walk with him around the perimeter fence if you like. But no jumping over, OK?"

  Built around 2020 on the higher ground outside what had once been the city limit, Forest Hills Open Prison was mainly for those convicted of professional misconduct – financial fraud, corruption and so on. The Professor was an exception. No-one had ever doubted his professional integrity. It was just that his deeply held views had led to an act that breached the law, though some thought that locking him up for so long merely reflected the Judge’s own deep prejudices.

  The view from Block 9 may have been what the more enlightened urban planners of thirty years ago had imagined. It was not unexpected that the population would increase dramatically and that the city would need to expand accordingly. Back then, everything had been in crisis - the housing crisis, the schools’ crisis, the health service crisis, the drugs crisis, the immigration crisis and, of course, the crisis of overcrowded prisons. New towns and cities with all the facilities and services expected by an ever-demanding public were proposed. Some were still on the drawing board.

  Besides the financial investments, the big problem in building millions of cheap houses, more hospitals, schools, roads and new prisons was space. No-one wanted to live where there wasn’t easy access to food, water, publicly funded services and every other modern comfort expected in the twenty first century, so there had been only one answer - to sacrifice the precious green belts, the fields and the woods and cover them with brick and concrete.

  Regulations had never required convicted law breakers to be granted panoramic views of open countryside. The only stipulation was that they were kept apart from law-abiding citizens. Back then it had not been deemed acceptable for the innocent masses to be forced to live directly opposite a thousand criminals. But the lack of space meant things needed to change. Regulations were made less rigid so that public sensitivities could be ignored and cheap housing for the masses had moved to right outside the prison gates.

  Calling the area Forest Hills might have been accurate once but it was now totally inappropriate. Instead of overlooking a steep and wooded valley, the prison looked down on an ever-expanding jungle of concrete, brick, plastic, glass, a matrix of streets and highways and crowds of people. The only mature tree left standing in the prison grounds was an old horse chestnut.

  “It is like a petri dish,” the Professor had once described the city’s expansion. “Instead of colonies of bacteria, we have people, but the result will be the same. Like bacteria, they will multiply and entirely fill the dish.”

  And when an architect had criticised the comparison, the Professor had felt obliged to respond. “No need to panic, sir,” he’d written, “Let nature take its course. Once everything is used up all the bacteria will die.”

  The reply had done nothing to improve the Professor’s reputation for saying the unsayable.

  Sam led him out into the grey, cold, dampness of open air to the Administration Block where, before them, lay the familiar view. On the horizon stood the dark outlines of high-rise apartments shrouded in grey, winter mist. Over the perimeter fence was the public road, the maze of terraces of cheap three storey houses and the western terminal for the city’s community transport where lines of red, articulated buses stood recharging batteries. Before them, lay a thousand square kilometres of sprawling urban development that had once been glorious green countryside.

  “A giant termite’s nest, Sam. A colony of millions,” the Professor had once told Sam. “Are they content to live like insects?”

  Sam always liked the Professor’s descriptions. “Aye, it’s a lot, Professor. Much too crowded. We can’t see them from up here but they’re there somewhere, in amongst the concrete.”

  The Professor took a breath and listened.

  The lungs no longer breathed air filled with the toxic fumes from two billion carbon fuelled cars and motorcycles These days it was the ears – the constant whine and hum from several billion electric engines, generators and reactors that went largely unnoticed except to the Professor. He winced at the low drone that hit his ears. “It’s bad this morning. Can you hear it?” he asked Sam. “It’s the low cloud and wind direction.”

  Sam stopped and listened. “Aye, it’s nothing, Professor. Ignore it. It’s your old ears.”

  “Nonsense, Sam. Constant high and low frequency background sound is often not heard until it’s switched off. It affects concentration but no-one will deal with it because it’ll put costs up. Meanwhile, it elevates stress levels and blood pressure. Constant background noise worsens symptoms rather than leading to habituation.”

  “Aye, you’re a mine of useless information. Professor.”

  “Maybe, but everyone, especially politicians, has selective hearing, Sam. They hear what they want to hear. Unwelcome facts make politician’s jobs harder so they ignore them.” He stopped, put his head on one side and listened to the low frequency drone that Sam seemed unable to detect. “You know what I think it is?”

  “You’re the scientist.”

  “There are two frequencies this morning, one deeper than the other. It’s the wind direction but I think the deeper sound is the electrical sewer lift, reverberating along the tunnels and resonating on the sewer hatches.”

  “Aye? Well, I’m darned,” Sam said still trying, unsuccessfully, to hear anything.

  “Did you know the city pumps over a trillion litres of sewage a year, Sam? Hundreds of billions of litres of it are spilled or leaked and it’s getting worse. As with so many other problems that go back years, public finances can’t cope. We need new sewage treatment technologies but it’s another failure of foresight, of not considering the effects of cramming more and more people into small areas.”

  “Dear Jesus.”

  “And praying won’t help, Sam. It’s our fault not God’s.”

  The Professor scanned the hazy view, listening also to other, more audible, noises rising from the city. He looked towards the houses behind the community transport station. Whatever their past opinions about living opposite an open prison, renting a house on a road with a grass verge was now a notable achievement. What had once been a small 7th century Anglo Saxon hamlet with a pond and village green on the edge of the forest worth, according to the Domesday Book, twenty shillings, had grown into a city of over two million people.

  Just a hundred years ago, ninety percent of the population claimed to be locals, born in or around the city. Fifty years ago, the numbers of locals had barely changed but they now represented only fifty percent. New arrivals, migrants and refugees accounted for the other half. Now, in 2050, the city’s population was a complex mix of many nationalities squeezed into congested, urban areas close to services and amenities and their own cultural familiarities. Moving to bare mountains and deserts to start again had never been an option for those who had fled
homes to seek shelter, schools, hospitals, water and food elsewhere. Neither was it convenient to live in the ever-contracting rural areas unless you could afford it.

  Meanwhile the world’s forests had been cleared to grow their food. In less than a century, the Amazon rainforest had been reduced by fifty percent. Entire forests in South East Asia had been slashed and burned to grow palm oil. African forests had disappeared to produce food and non-essential luxuries like chocolate. Years of digging for raw materials had left vast, barren landscapes that without water and time would take years to recover. Now, even the depths of the sea were being mined leaving huge areas of scarred but invisible evidence of human activity. But whether it was chocolate, oil or vegetables for western hypermarkets, profit for the wealthy few had always been the driving force. The majority, the poor, just did the work and stayed poor.

  Forest destruction - Thailand

  The Professor shook his head in dismay.

  Scattered amongst the vast housing estates were the hypermarkets, schools and health centres. The older and bigger dwellings had become the care homes for thousands of elderly and sick and the cramped living rooms for the unemployed. Today, driven by the chilly, wind blowing from within the city’s dark depths it was the hum of thousands of electric vehicles - trucks, buses and trains - that the Professor could hear above the hum of the sewage lift.

  Then, without warning came another sound - an outburst of deep, loud, thumping music from somewhere within the housing estate opposite. To anyone close-by it would have been deafening. Even Sam heard it this time. “Jesus Christ.”

  The Professor stopped for a moment. Even from the prison grounds the thumping bass beat that reverberated on the chest cavity was painful. To anyone closer it would have been a health risk. No wonder their sense of hearing was going.