by Wayne Hill
“And you said, ‘Yeah, fuck it!’?” asks Fishbalm.
“No. I said, ‘what’s a pub?’”
Everyone laughs again, and then then laughs trail off curiously as Splinter silently lurches off with intent. Splinter had found a table with an ample supply of dregs and was currently cleaning them up by necking them all.
“What the fuck are you doing, you absolute knob?” asks Gert watching Splinter consuming indescribable filth. “We are in a bar! We’re in your bar!”
Between mouthfuls of who-knows-what, Splinter says: “Gert was all shine...” — necking a glass of rum with several cigarette butts — “no sparkle ...” — a half glass of scotch with an olive disappears — “all shell, no pearl...” — Vodka and the soggy remnant of what looks like a biscuit — “I couldn’t leave her there with those floating space turds...” — brandy and (hopefully) beard hair — “leeching...” — rice wine and a drowned spider — “drooling...” — a Manhattan with extra flies — “she deserves better...” — half a glass of tequila containing seven large garden worms — “she was a trapped lioness...” — a cream liquor, with lipstick around the glass rim and another floating cigar butt — “not a fucking attraction for the credit rich!”
Splinter upends the table, and the glasses smash everywhere.
“Fucking those old toads for the chance to have a dome with a rainforest! The thing is, once you make a certain amount for planet Tate, they never let you leave. Not until your essence is purged and you leave an old used-up husk. Like making perfume ... or wine ... everything is squashed and pressed out of you, leaving only a bland husk behind. No amount of Credits is worth your life force. I told her that there’s a terrible plague speeding its way towards everyone, and that we might be able to help her.
“Those guys would’ve all been dead within a year, anyway ... Planet Skeleton they would have called it. Planet Death. She said that’s what she called it now.”
“Yeah, that’s one thing,” says Gert, trying to change topic on the increasingly agitated Splinter, “but what really sealed the deal for me was when he fought a band of Scottish Picts. You also made me see the caveman section in a different light ... What was it you said? ... Oh, yeah. It was important to bring back real Neanderthals, not imprison brainwashed people who thought that they were on Earth. It was cruel. He said, ‘You are endorsing it by staying here another second!’ So, I left with him ... and I’ve been drunk ever since, haha.”
Seeing how Gert had diffused an increasingly unstable Splinter, Fishbalm continued in the same vein: “So, Enslin, how about you? How did you end up here?”
Splinter laughs. “That’s an amusing story, young fishy-face. Mind if I tell this one, Enslin, laddie?”
Enslin swallows a large draught of ale and shakes his head a little sourly. He knows what is coming.
“Tough!” Splinter beams. “I’m telling the story anyway!”
Splinter pulls over a chair, stands on it — swaying and swirling his arms for balance, nearly hitting Enslin on the head with the brandy bottle into the bargain — and clears his throat, theatrically.
“Enslin was a space miner, mining meteors and asteroids for gold and platinum. They are known as Dredgers. They get precious materials for the USA. Enslin, at the time, was mining platinum. It was easy work. Like all Dredgers he had his own patch, an area within the huge meteor belts with which he was familiar and where he did most of his work. Occasionally an interstellar meteor enters the solar system, and events like that are potential goldmines for Dredgers. These visiting meteors are often packed with rare minerals, alien materials, uncut diamonds of rare purity, etc. — you name it. Dredgers can practically name their own price to the USA for rare or coveted minerals. This is how Enslin ended up on prison planet Earth.”
Enslin downed almost a full pint of ale and moved away to refill his tankard, clearly muttering obscenities under his breath, his face darkening. Splinter, rather maliciously, turns on his soap-box chair, following Enslin with his words. In doing so, he again nearly hits Enslin with his flailing brandy bottle and cannon arm as the grumbling man passes below him.
“Enslin, here, hit the ultimate jackpot. The biggest find in all Dredger history! It was rich in alien minerals, foreign diamonds, pure gold and several other rare metals. Enslin’s idea was to barter with the USA for enough money to set him up with his very own moon colony. The highest quality domes, filled with non-stop entertainment, non-stop parties: festivals of love, festivals of good food and better music. One dome was going to be full of amazing forests: a preservation dome where he would drop in rare animals. It was going to be a real taste of old-school Earth, wasn’t it Enslin?”
Filling his tankard from one of Jonesy’s treasured ale pumps, a scowling Enslin flips Splinter off.
Splinter laughs so hard at this that he nearly falls off his chair. In keeping his balance on the chair, he assumes some funny postures. Everyone laughs at that. Even Enslin cracks a smile, but later insists that it would have been funnier if Splinter had fallen from the chair and broken his neck.
Wiping tears, one-handed, from his eyes, Splinter continues.
“Anyway, the dome was going to be gigantic. After a double cross, Enslin found himself in hot water with the Believers. They wanted him to revise his costings. To drop his price to a dome, not on the moon, but on mars. It went against Enslin’s plans and, in retrospect, he reacted poorly. He found out who had betrayed him to the Believer’s court — it was some lieutenant in the Association, some brat, someone ladder climbing — found this man’s family dome and, after a bit too much space grog, sent all his animals into it. The hundreds of species of animals he had raised: cubs, kittens, poulets, piglets, keets, yearlings, joeys, owlets, eyas, sucklings, hatchlings, whelps. The man’s dome would never smell the same again. Hundreds of animals shat everywhere.”
Here Splinter pauses because Fishbalm is laughing so hard he is nearly choking.
“Anyway,” Splinter says pointedly to the barely recovered Fishbalm. “Enslin got sent before the courts and was banished, but he had a smile on his face because he knew he had got one of them. He showed them. I like to think that that made him laugh in his darkest moments. To imagine the look on that smug bastard’s face when he saw a wilderness of animals eating his posh furniture and crapping in his porcelain bath. Yeah, I think he felt it was worth it. Smelly vengeance.” Splinter sighs melodramatically. “Right. I suppose I should now tell my sad story. Well —”
“Do you have to?” asks Gert. “Everyone knows your story, Splinter. It’s a legend in the Lanes.”
Splinter shrugs, drops unsteadily off his chair, sits down on it and gestures to Frobel.
“Really?” asks Frobel. “Do I have to? I fucking hate all this sharing bollocks. I’m here because I’m a fucknut.”
This gathers a ripple of laughter.
“Go on, Frobel,” says Enslin. “It’s interesting for The Marauder.”
Frobel looks blankly from Enslin towards Fishbalm. “I am finding it interesting,” confirms Fishbalm.
“Fine. If The Marauder insists,” says Frobel, with a glug of ale. “You probably already know the story, but you just haven’t heard it from the original Lancer. I almost destroyed the entire system. Everything. Nearly shut it all down. I was known as Lightning Lance ...”
He pauses dramatically for Fishbalm to respond. Fishbalm does not disappoint.
“Holy shit!” a wide-eyed Patrick responds. “I remember you! I was really young when it all happened, though. Didn’t you create an army of robots, or something?”
“I might as well tell the full story —”
“Hi, I’m the mighty Frobel Lancer,” interrupts Enslin, in a high-pitched sing-song voice. “I’m a maintenance droid repair man who likes Crème de Menth and fart jokes.”
Gert giggles.
“You really are a simple man, Enslin,” says Frobel with a sigh. “I feel so sorry for your skull.”
Everyone looks to Enslin, who is l
ighting another cigarette. “How’s that?” says Enslin, narrowing his eyes.
“Well,” explains Frobel, pulling himself another ale, “your skull has to cuddle that space-turd that you call a brain.”
“Yep,” Enslin says. “Good one. Well ... go on, Frobel.”
With a couple of occasional glances toward Enslin, expecting further interjections, Frobel continues his story.
“Frobel Lancer at your service, young Marauder! Maintenance-droid repair man, par excellence — that’s me! At least, that’s who I was. But I had ambition and passion and dreams. I brought RI (Real Intelligence) into existence. I created the designs for transcendence, to transport my consciousness into a machine. I was part of a movement, a movement that I created.”
“Huh, I create movements every morni—” Enslin stopped mid-sentence as, without taking her eyes from Frobel, Gert had calmly pulled a gun and placed it on the counter.
“You were saying, Frobel?” says Gert sweetly.
“Thanks Gert. I tried to create something new, something original. It was stopped immediately, and the rebellious Frobel is banished. Banished to spend the rest of his life on prison planet Earth. I just wanted to share with the universe something I believed in, something that’s true ... I don’t really want to tell this fucking story! It’s not really as good as you guys’ stories, and I get really wound up by it all still. Fucking Association bastards!”
“I hear that brother,” says Splinter from somewhere behind them. He has gone back to mine sweeping tables.
Gert grabs the lower part of Fishbalm’s face, squeezes his cheeks together so his mouth becomes a pout and turns his head towards Frobel.
“Listen, man,” Gert says intensely to Frobel. “This little man is new to the Lanes. He’s out of his depth and your story is a life-raft of knowledge that will save him. Look at him! Will you please look at this poor boy!” says Gert.
“UUUUMMM DER MURLAUDER!” a drunk Fishbalm tries to shout from between Gert’s squeezing fingers.
Frobel laughs.
“Fuck it, Okay. The rant goes something like this — it’s not from the original script, that was fucking incinerated! — Heathen luddites, we evolved, young Fishbalm, The Marauder, on this planet from other life forms. From bacteria to plants and fungi to the complexity of the apes you see before you, walking around, looking at screens and babbling about who’s doing better than who, and going Optimal for Credits —”
“You’re steering the ship off course,” shouts Splinter, looking crazily on from a nearby table. “I’m your rudder man now! Tell young fish-face about the equality part — it’s ... fucking perfect!”
Frobel takes a long swallow of ale and removes a sleek hand-rolled cigarette from an old tin shaped like a guitar. He lights it, takes another swallow of ale and grimaces. He considers the magnitude of his life and a drunken thought springs into his intoxicated brain, unbidden. A thought he has had many times in the past: I could have been a god!
Drawing the smoke deeply into his lungs, savouring the mellow burn, he continues to talk, expelling the smoke in an expanding cloud. “True equality will only become reality,” he says, “when a higher form of intelligence takes the lead. That will only be possible through advances, and advances are sometimes painful. Unfortunately, the advance named artificial intelligence was highly painful.”
“I remember artificial intelligence,” says Gert. “I remember how scared everyone was and then how nothing happened —”
“Everything happened, Gert!” says Frobel leaning forward in his seat, animated. “Everything fucking happened! People were just looking the wrong way when the fireworks went off! They were all scratching each other’s backs to get Credits and pissing around in the boils of meteors, with long fucking walks along imaginary beaches!”
Splinter stares at Frobel.
“Well, old chap,” says Frobel, “I thought they all knew what was going on. Obviously not. We people are, after all, the nuclei of Twatdom.”
Splinter lurches for another bottle of brandy, near Gert. She grabs it first, slapping the back of his hand, playfully, and then passes it to him.
“Dickhead,” she says to Frobel, “don’t be so obnoxious. History is not my strong suit, and Patrick looks like a foetus with sideburns.” She turns a playful smile to Fishbalm.
“I am nineteen!” insists Fishbalm, with drunken petulance.
“You are a foetus,” says Gert, tousling his hair.
“Don’t take any grief off these Bucky-brained space-turds!” says Enslin with authority, getting up to pour another drink for himself and Frobel. “You’re The Marauder!”
“It was the data of the lost souls of Earth,” says Frobel ignoring the others and lost in the mists of inebriated recollection. “That’s how I created a framework. It was from the collected wisdom of their internet web-like sprawling minds. The ancient time when our people used the internet to document their entire lives.”
“Humans are tribal by their very nature,” says Fishbalm, wanting to add something and hoping that this made sense.
“I figured out early on,” continues Frobel seemingly staring at Splinter’s mechanical arm, “that the only way to survive, as a species, isn’t to mingle with the radical technology that we are creating, it’s to stand back and let the technology evolve on its own. This will happen, naturally, because there’s no such thing as artificial — if it’s come from us it’s come from nature.”
“I’m maybe starting to see why you’re here, Frobel” says Fishbalm, puffing on a cigarette rolled and lit for him by Gert. Their combined smoke was starting to form a shifting ocean above them, getting deeper every minute. “It seems a real gamble, what you were proposing.”
“The coming generation,” continues Frobel — all but ignoring the tankard of ale Enslin had just set before him — “the real übermensch, might jump to the conclusion that we — humanity — are inferior, as so many of us believe we are. Personally, I believe we would be considered ancestors and would be revered. They would be grateful to us and would leave us to wallow in our organic ignorance.”
“And —” adds Splinter, nearly halfway through his second bottle of brandy — “if you went back in time and met your ancestors, you really wouldn’t be tooled up going, ‘Come on, then, you scumbag! Try and take me out now, with your fucking kedgeree and your potato broth!’...”
“Fear and stupidity,” says Enslin, annoyed once more about his friend’s plight. “They are idiots, Frobel. You shouldn’t be here, man.”
“Thanks, Enslin,” Frobel says, with a tear forming in an eye. “It would have been something to see, though. The network would have contained the perspective of almost every human. We are talking about a being that had, at its beck-and-call, every known work of art and literature, every word and picture, every scientific and sociological experiment and experience added to the internet. Everything. With the power to create and piece together, in a perfect mandala of achievement, every pattern of thought. It would represent the greatest gathering of souls.”
Splinter throws a cigar butt into an empty glass and pours brandy over it; a serious look traverses the scars of his face. Splinter stands and raises his filthy drink, addressing Frobel.
“The USA is thriving. There’s a new class of enslavement every generation, and it’s always the things people want that trap them. And ignoring the bullshit rat-race, you, my friend, were The Man. The ubernerd who put together the final parts to something that could have sparked the final downfall of this system. I salute you, Frobel Lancer!”
Splinter makes the filth disappear in a glug and takes an unsteady stroll to find a bar stool.
“Thanks, Splinter,” says Frobel. “This is important, and, like assholes, everyone has an opinion. I’m mindful of a quote I memorized years ago. It was by Jean Francois Millet, a French artist of the 17th century, I think. He painted peasants in fields and suchlike. The most beautiful images of hard-working people labouring to survive. Labouring just so we ca
n be here, so everything could eventually arrive. He said: ‘To make the trivial serve; is to express the sublime.’ I pondered this saying through years and years of profoundly bad jobs — and I’ve held many.”
Here Frobel stops talking to assess his crowd, like any truly great orator. “I’ve worked with some of the best...”— here he smiles at Gert — “and dangerous people ...” — here he inclines his head to Splinter — “this harsh universe has to offer. And I know this one thing —”
“This is it, Fish- Face!” yells Splinter in Fishbalm’s ear, as he pulls a barstool over, sits down, and vigorously nudges the young man with his elbow. Splinter knows Frobel is going into full lecture mode.
“— whether it’s a meteorite or a plague, if it’s a nuke or a solar flare, nothing will destroy what we have inside us,” says Frobel. “It’s vast and unimaginable, and it’s locked deep inside everyone. Old spiritualists once called it the Akashic records. Most people are truly unaware of their own power.
“I had a peek at what’s around the corner. I looked at the vastness and the emptiness that exists simultaneously. I know what I am, and I know what you are. The peace I give to you is the gnosis I have gained from a lifetime of robotics and lonely isolation. I am the cold metal of this world. I am human, I am orangutang, I am fish, I am fungus, and I am plant. I am a bacterium on a rogue planet screaming across interstellar space. I'm gathering spores in space as I collide with other meteors. I’m on a collision course with a dead planet, a frozen planet of ice and metal. I bring with me all these small seeds of life. I bring with me death and suffering and pain and joy and feeling.
“Everything begins with a violent collision. An accidental pairing. A chance union. And the ripples of this violent union of this strange mixture of bacteria that should never have been together is playing out in fractal moments, in everyday occurrences, in chance meetings, violent starts, creative ends. Creative starts and violent ends.