Free Sunstorm by Arthur C. Clarke

city’s mood souring.
    In the few hours of the storm itself there had been genuine deprivation and fear—and casualties, including more than a thousand deaths in the inner city. And yet it was a time of heroism. There was still no official estimate of how many lives had been saved from fires, or stranding in Underground tunnels, or road pileups, or the lethal mundanity of being trapped in stuck elevators.
    In the days that immediately followed, too, Londoners had pulled together. Shops had opened up, displaying the hand-drawn BUSINESS AS USUAL signs that usually defied terrorist outrages. There had been cheers when the first 1950s-vintage “Green Goddess” fire engines had gone clanging through the streets of the city, museum-piece equipment that was “too stupid to fail,” proclaimed the Mayor. It was a time of resilience, of the “spirit of the Blitz,” people said, harking back to a time of even greater challenge now almost a century past.
    But that mood was quickly dispelled.
    The world had continued to turn, and June 9 had begun to fade in the memory. People tried to get back to work, schools were reopening, and the great electronic-commerce channels began to function at something like their old capacity again. But London’s recovery remained patchy: there was still no water supply in Hammersmith, no power in Battersea, no functioning traffic management system in Westminster. Soon patience was running out, and people were looking for somebody to blame.
    By October both Bisesa and her daughter had got a little stir-crazy. They had ventured out of the flat a few times, to the river and the parks, walking through a fractious city. But their freedom of movement was limited. The credit chip implanted in Bisesa’s arm was more than five years old, and its internal data were long since scrambled: in a time of global electronic tagging she was a nonperson. Without a functioning chip she couldn’t shop for herself, couldn’t take the Underground, couldn’t even buy her kid an ice cream.
    She knew she couldn’t go on like this forever. At least with her fritzed chip she was invisible, from the Army and everybody else. But it was only the fact that she had long ago given her cousin Linda access to her savings that kept her from starving.
    She still didn’t feel able to move on, however. It wasn’t just her need to be with Myra. She was still failing to get her head around her extraordinary experiences.
    She tried to figure it all out by writing down her story. She dictated to Aristotle, but her murmuring disturbed Myra. So in the end she wrote it all out longhand, and let Aristotle scan it into electronic memory. She tried to get it right; she went back through successive drafts, emptying her memory of as much as she could remember, the spectacular and the trivial alike.
    But as she stared at the words on the softscreen before her, in the mundanity of her flat with Myra’s cartoons and synth-soaps babbling in the background, she believed it less and less herself.
             
    On June 8, 2037, Lieutenant Bisesa Dutt had been on peacekeeping patrol in a corner of Afghanistan. With her was another British officer, Abdikadir Omar, and an American, Casey Othic. In that troubled part of the world they were all wearing the blue helmets of the UN. It had been a routine patrol, just another day.
    Then some kid had tried to shoot their chopper down—and the sun had lurched across the sky—and when they had emerged from the crashed machine, they had found themselves somewhere different entirely. Not another place, but another
time.
    They had fallen to earth in the year 1885: a time when the area was called the North–West Frontier by the imperial British who controlled it. They had been taken to a fort called Jamrud, where Bisesa had met a young Bostonian journalist called Josh White. Born in 1862, long dust in Bisesa’s world, Josh was aged only twenty-three
here.
And here too, astonishingly, was Rudyard Kipling,