Where do you see yourself in ten years? (1)

War, starvation, climate collapse. Mere distractions! The real problem is my head of department.

It's Great Britain, 2035.

I should say, Formerly Great Britain. We won't know its new name until we find out who wins the gruelling trench warfare, the Russians or the Chinese. By that time it's unlikely to matter. Assuming there will still be historians to study this when it’s over, they will probably say it was exactly as if the battle for, say, Bakhmut, had been scaled up to engulf an entire island — just like with Bakhmut, they have to keep fighting because they can't give the other side a propaganda win, even though the island of Britain is obviously of zero strategic value.

So far, there are still some historians. I hate them. Whenever we have all-staff university-wide video calls, we're repeatedly told what a great funding game the History Department has been playing, receiving huge wads of cash from both of the invading armies. History may be written by the victors, but they need to start early.

More importantly, the Historians are among the key players in securing us vast levels of military defence support. The rest of the city was uninhabitable 18 months ago, but thanks to a combination of sturdy defence and wily diplomacy with both occupying governments, we academics are still proudly continuing our ancient tradition of forming committees, holding meetings, and pretending to teach courses.

Our students are now all soldiers. It's a beautiful thing. Our targeted AI marketing campaign works so well that crowds of soldiers put down their arms and surrender to the campus, convinced that a degree in English Literature, Greek Philosophy, or Sustainable Architecture will transform their lives¹. We welcome them all, so long as they pick their guns back up, and bring them in with them. We offer attractive fee subsidies to anyone who will work part-time operating the air defence system.

The Physics Department — before the invasion.

I feel lucky to be here. Who would have thought, ten years ago, or even five, that the UK would be one of the world's last true havens for academia? Certainly none of our old research rock stars. They deserted during the first period of economic free-fall, for the rich US universities and European research institutes. Now look where they are. Do they prefer the Russian labour camps in former Europe, or the Chinese labour camps in the former US?

Sure, most of the UK universities went out of business in the late 20s, after the most gullible portion of the population — pick any fraction you like, and I can find you a study that argues it was higher — emigrated to Australia. So much for the plucky patriots. Over a century of dubious hype had convinced the rain-sodden British that they could escape to a sizzling sun-drenched paradise. Sizzling it certainly was, especially when history's largest bushfire engulfed both Sydney and Melbourne, almost simultaneously.

Everyone said it was a monstrous tragedy, and I suppose it was, but back here was the real tragedy: mass academic redundancies.

The only people who were happy were the handful of remaining distinguished professors, who got to upgrade to fill the new Oxbridge vacancies. They were only happy for a little while. Then the war began. The invading forces immediately targeted what they assumed were the highest concentrations of our intellectual talent, and two of the greatest scholarly institutions in human history were wiped out in one night of fire-bombing. At least, that's what we think happened. It was hard to tell what was going on during the information blackout. Our only indication that something serious had happened was when all the British research-quality indicators suddenly shot up.

So now it's down to just a few of us. We were saved by our mediocrity and global obscurity. And, of course, we mustn't forget, since it received so much scorn at the time: our colossal investment in the most shameless and underhanded of the new marketing technologies. Prior to the war, it was cutting-edge artificial-intelligence algorithms that allowed us to brainwash the dwindling classes of the internationally wealthy to pay ever-growing fees to keep us afloat. And, yes, we are aware that some of our loudest critics blame us for developing those algorithms in collaboration with the two superpowers that later used that technology to flip entire populations to unexpectedly support their takeover plans. So what? We all know that progress cannot be held back, and we are proud to have been at the forefront of the greatest technological leaps of the 21st century.

And it's not like moral preening did anyone else any good.

The invasions may have been spearheaded by machine-learning/mind-turning breakthroughs, but the two adversaries' competitive advantage rapidly evaporated. They are now at a population-manipulation stalemate: the surviving citizenry is so relentlessly bombarded by conflicting yet irresistible messages that they are barely aware of anything beyond their most immediate needs, and cannot formulate a single coherent thought. Or as I like to say, we're back to normal.

The surviving academics are rather chipper. This is a dream come true. Most of our competitors have been wiped out, quite literally. So is most of the rest of the UK economy, making higher education now the most profitable industry in the country. We may live in malnourished squalor, but that was always the case; now we can take comfort that everyone else's standards of living are far far worse.

Perhaps most thrilling of all, research is booming. I would never have imagined how many great ideas I would have while on trench patrol at 3am.

Not that everything is perfect. We are beset by many hardships.

The worst is our head of department. He is a megalomaniac. He cares about nothing but growing his political empire, and expanding his lab space.

I have tried to ignore his games, but now he has become a direct threat. The basement lab he occupies is next to mine, and I am convinced that he wants to kick me out — me, and my entire family. We abandoned our house and moved in here two years ago, just before the drone attacks became 24-7. It's very cosy, especially in the winter, when I have all the heat output from the refrigeration equipment pumped into our sleeping corner. We might be the snuggest little family in the country, me, my wife, our one surviving child, and the three commando grad students who keep guard.

I should clarify: the grad students are not protecting us from Russian or Chinese soldiers. Indeed, they are Russian and Chinese soldiers, now united in a common cause of protecting our low-temperature lab, at least until their PhD theses are submitted. Our real enemies are the other experimental groups, who engage in ferocious internecine warfare. And the worst of those is of course the group lead by the head of department.

Our only hope, I believe, is to unseat him.

Fear not. I have a plan.

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What will happen next? Find out in Part 2.

1. To be fair, the field of sustainable architecture is in serious need of some new ideas. The old ideas were no match for a sustained drone attack.