Martin Barham-Turnbull
2008 was Our year. It was when so many of my fellow Englishmen moved to Titan. We moved not just people, but entire places as well. Big Ben? Moved. The Tower of London? moved. All it's contents too. On top of that, Ten Million members of the United Kingdom.
Just think about that for a moment. The logistics involved here were immense. One does not joke when they say that a fifth of the UK moved house to explore and colonise their new land. We had Shakers, Thinkers, Tinkers, Parahumans of all shape and size who moved there for the short term. Obviously, there were conditions too. If you wanted to move there, you had to have justification. First and most common reason? Family lost to or currently engaged in fighting the Endbringers. That was your big ticket. Myself? My Brother was a member of the Kingsmen. Five back to back fights. That alone meant not just his wife and children, but myself, my wife, my children and our Parents came along as well.
Someone, likely a Colonial Tourist once joked to me that England's national hobby was queuing. Standing in line for hours on end, waiting to reach a pre-determined point to achieve a goal. This? This was the national hobby writ large. Your mind boggled when you first see a Million people waiting in lines for the shuttles that would take us to our new homes. Entire cities had been laid out, infrastructure in place so that we would step off the shuttle and one of an endless stream of vehicles would take you to your new, assigned home.
Michael had to have pulled some strings. I have no idea whom he spoke to, but there you go, he still had to have. After all, how else would the whole family wind up with four consecutive houses, all a mile apart, on rolling fields that remind me of the South Downs. The bars were there and when we were unpacked (a minor herculean task in and of itself) I discovered that the sheer amount of land we now owned meant I could re-start the family business with only minor effort. A dozen stout fellows hired from the local town and the Hops vines were planted. The Oast was ready to go and after talking with one of the neighbours in the pup one evening, I arranged for the barley to be planted and in return for a certain amount of the end product, harvested too.
Still, it didn't matter. It was relaxing in a way. The Village of South Harbledown was a nice place, felt very Kentish in a way. The local was pleasant and properly made, there were shops for what we needed and the Wife had a vegetable garden coming along nicely too. The kids? Well, they didn't like the lack of internet and spotty mobile phone reception, but they had fields to run in, a forest to explore, I made them read the old books from my childhood to give them ideas. Secret Seven, Famous Five as well as Swallows and Amazons. A few of the early Hardy Boys too for fun. Still, soon enough they had plenty of fun and games to keep them busy until the new school opened up. They had bikes already and soon enough, there was an unruly flock of children on bikes occasionally seen zipping around the back roads in search of buried treasure. It didn't help that the Wife and some of her friends had a tea group that would occasionally let it be overheard that there was rumored to be a reef of Gemstones and some Endbringer material somewhere in the area, a leftover from the geo-forging. Give the children some shovels and buckets, purchase a large bell to hang off the kitchen door to ring and let them know that dinner would be in an hour and we hardly ever saw them.
I have to say, I rather liked it here.
Of course, the News was reporting all sorts of problems. Kings Landing, the largest city, was having all sorts of problems with overcrowding. Silly fools who couldn't comprehend living outside of cities. I bet they were from Newcastle or Manchester. Possibly Scots from Glasgow too, the heathens with their parochial ways and hideous accents as they butcher the Kings Tongue.
Thats when we discovered a slight issue with the wonderful diversity and richness of culture the UK had produced. Back in England, they were constrained by popular opinion and laws. Here? Bloody Gypsies and worse. To the north, a bunch of idiot scots were painting themselves blue and trying to form a new nation based on Traditional Scottish Values! We all got a laugh out of that at the local and wondered why sheep buggery was such a delightful occupation that they wanted for form a new nation based around it.
It wasn't all fun and games, but once you were off Earth, you entered a level of disconnect. The events back on Earth that affected the Motherland were remote, distant and in two years when we became self sufficient, we'd have even less connection. We were safe and with it came a certain level of relaxation and laxity. Indulgent? yes, absolutely but I could not name a single person who did not at least know someone who had lost someone to the Endbringers. Yet here I was. My own sister died in Paris. The Wife's parents were lost in the London attack. We had had enough.
So here I was, sweeping in the dried hops in the Oast. The Barley was already in and tomorrow, the first batch of New Promise Bitter would be going into the kettles. I was no longer a store manager for the largest fast food chain in the world, selling countless disgusting fat filled hamburgers to spotty teenagers. No, I'd moved up in the world. I was now a gentleman farmer. I had land, large amounts of it. I had children who ran around and enjoyed the world, not spending their life glued to their phones and the tele. I had a wife that knew how to brew good beer and was teaching me. I had to move to a new planet, but this really is the life.