Life Force

Storyline

It is the year 2025, and the Earth is vastly different to what it was twenty five years prior. Global warming has advanced to the extent that the polar ice caps have been completely melted into the sea, flooding much of the land formerly above in an event known as The Drowning. In Britain, the whole south of the country is underwater, and the north only exists as a small collection of islands. Many of those that still survive on them are now cruelly oppressed by a new authoritarian government, who deploy a ruthless federal task force, The Commission, to carry out their work. Scientists are used as scapegoats for the flooding disaster - despite trying to stop it from happening - and their entire practice is outlawed. The many climate refugees, nicknamed 'climeys', are also treated with disdain. Some pockets of resistance still remain. On the tiny Black Combe Island, surrounded by the Cumbrian Sea in the Western String - previously the Lake District and Cumbrian Mountains - Amy Webber and her husband Richard set up a school. They hope to teach and raise a new generation of scientists who will fix the world and help Greenwatch, an international underground movement for the environment. Amy discovers that some of the school's students, particularly young Mai-Li Cheung and Ash Karnak, have incredible psychic powers, much like her own. They are 'senders', genetically modified people with the gifts of advanced telepathic and telekinetic abilities. Though potentially valuable weapons in their fight, Amy knows their nature alone makes them an illegal, vulnerable target for the authorities. Her fears are nearly proven in a sudden Commission raid on the school, dictated by their tyrannical sender agent Kurt Glemser. She and Richard are arrested - but Mai-Li and Ash, though equally in danger, are initially not located, and have to go on the run. Also now needing to fend for themselves are the Webbers' own teenage children, Greg and Karen, who have been left behind in the raid. The two sender children and Webber siblings come together, and are taken to their new guardian Goodman, an old family friend and Greenwatch campaigner in hiding at his secret laboratory in a derelict mill. Though still at risk from the evil Glemser, intent on hunting the senders down for his superiors, they aim to continue the mission that Amy and Richard took on - protecting lives, rescuing the world, and evading danger.