The summer of 2147 was a particularly barren one as far as news stories went. Deadlines for on-line publications aren't as tight as they were back in the days of hot lead and rolling presses, but nonetheless if I wanted to keep on eating I had to keep on writing, however on that particular day my mind was completely empty of ideas. In desperation I called up the Times website and began to browse through their back issues. Old news stories rarely grip - the long-forgotten peccadillos of equally long-forgotten politicians, crimes from yesteryear that are just the same as the crimes of yesterday, accidents and disasters involving people we know nothing about and couldn't care less about - and to try and get a lead I typed the word "mystery" into the search box and hit Return.
There was no lack of "mystery" stories. Most were the usual silly season tales of UFOs, ghosts, kidnapped cats and sleep-walking sex attackers and I was about to type something else into the search box when my eye was caught by a story about the mysterious disappearance of George Moreton, a finance director for Intergalactica Ltd. I had never heard of Mr Moreton before, but it appeared that on November 3, 2093, he and his fiance took off from Heston Flight Centre (the former Heathrow airport) in their cruiser for the short hop to Norton airbase and vanished.
That was fairly mysterious, for modern space cruisers do not simply vanish over the most populated part of England. They crash and leave wreckage scattered everywhere, but they do not vanish without a radar trace or an automated all-frequencies Mayday call. It was sufficiently intriguing that I called up the newspapers for November 4 of 2093 and it was there that I found the real mystery of George Moreton's disapearance.
According to a throw-away comment in a story put on-line at 11.07 of November 4, Mr Moreton's fiance was supposed to have come from another planet. That wouldn't be news today, but back fifty years ago it was so improbable that I typed "George Moreton" into Google and got several million "hits" - I never knew it was such a popular name! I refined my search and tried again. After several unsuccessful attempts I struck gold, in a manner of speaking.
Back in October of that year George Moreton had given an interview to the BBC and the film was still available on an internet archive. I sat and watched as George explained that his fiance was a human from a clone of earth that was not only several light years away, but two thousand years younger - and when I say "clone" I don't just mean that the atmosphere or the continents were the same. Moreton claimed that on this other earth the Roman Empire was still in existence - and right on cue his fiance, a dark-haired girl with an olive-brown skin and wearing a sort of toga affair, walked on set and sat down beside him.
It was all fascinating stuff and I sensed that there was a story there, but that deadline loomed and I had to reluctantly put George Moreton to one side and get on with earning my daily crust. Over the next few months, however, I spent quite a bit of time researching the story of George Moreton; I even tracked down someone who claimed to have worked with him at Intergalactica half a century earlier and he hinted that George had been under something of a cloud at the time of his disappearance, though he was unable to remember the exact details. Hints of scandal, however, prompted me to try Scotland Yard and once again found more than I had expected.
I was escorted into the Crimnal Investigations Library and once my identity and my journalistic credentials had been scrutinised and checked a police officer brought me a folder containing everything to do with George Moreton. There were photographs of the man himself, a well-built figure with piercing eyes and a shock of thick red hair. There were reports from Scene of Crime officers and photographs of his house, interviews with neighbours, his employer and anyone else they could think of, there was a whole sheaf of printouts of news stories, in short, everything that you would expect to find in an investigation into a missing person.
"There's also this," the officer said, handing me a second folder.
"What is it?" I asked as I reached for it.
The officer shrugged. "I've no idea - I just work here. I can tell you that what's in there was handed to us by a Mrs Loretta Squires fifteen years ago. She found it among her husband's things after he died and said that she thought it might be useful to us."
"And was it?" I asked, opening the file which contained a sheaf of paper, printed with an ink-jet printer to judge by the way the letters had bled into the white of the paper.
The officer grinned mirthlessly. "All I can tell you, sir, is that a week after that arrived, I was told to mark Mr Moreton's file 'NFA' - that's 'No Further Action'. It's lucky for you that I was on duty today, because most of the chaps who work here wouldn't have known about it, seeing as it is a separate file."
What follows is the contents of that file. From the characteristics of the spelling, I would say that the text was dictated into a computer voice-recognition system by someone who had no time to check what the computer was recognising. The girl's name, for example, is rendered variously as "Libya", "labia" or, in one place, "livid". As none of those seem likely names for a respectable Roman matron, I have reconstructed it as "Livia". I have made similar corrections throughout the manuscript and have also tidied up the grammar in a few places where last century's spoken English does not make good written English for the mid-Twenty-second Century.
I have done what checking I could on the details mentioned in the story and so far as I can discover, all the names mentioned are those of real people and the account given by the author - whom I believe to have been Mr Moreton himself - tallies very closely with the newspaper reports of the time. Apart from that, however, I make no claims concerning the story and the reader must judge for himself how much of the tale is fact and how much is fiction.
Islington
September 2148