Prof had administrative responsibilities for one of the academic workers’ residential areas, rather like the university don he once was. It was perhaps lucky his area of authority included Alexander’s living accommodation. The biometric data of the bursar and the cleaners were included in the software which operated the doors of private rooms. It took Prof no more than five minutes to appoint himself as a cleaning supervisor. He could easily erase the post later.
Having checked Alexander’s meeting schedule, Prof returned to his own room. He collected his com-pad, and a list of robot fire extinguishers from his desk. It was well known he periodically walked the residential corridors, checking that routine inspections had been carried out. He went to his bathroom cabinet and stared at the stoppered bottle of white powder for a while, before taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeve. His preparations complete, he set off for Alexander’s rooms.
Checking there was no one in the corridor, Prof slipped into Clive Alexander’s apartment. Like many experts in their field, Clive tended to invent his own systems rather than follow authorised procedures. But keeping mem-drives locked in a box labelled ‘Gorgonblast Project’ did not, perhaps, offer the highest level of security for a top-secret development. Prof prised open the lid with a screwdriver and copied the files onto his com-pad. He looked through the door’s spyhole, confirmed no one was in sight, and stepped out into the corridor.
A Securopa officer, standing on one side of the door with his back against the wall, snapped handcuffs on Prof’s wrists within seconds. Major Breckenridge, waiting on the other side, pulled the com-pad from under Prof’s arm. He levered open the case, ripped out a chip array and tossed it on the floor. Scything downwards with his steel-tipped heel, he smashed the memory into fragments.
Breckenridge smiled. For once his face showed no sign of its convulsive tic. ‘You can’t have a com-pad where you’re goin’, Prof. But you’re gonna love your new accommodation. I’ve got some serious new substances for you to try. Believe me, they’ll melt your mind.’
Endgame
Geoff read the message:
Wally:
Ace job, you guys. The G-bombs are gonners. I counted eighteen flashes, fifty million miles from Earth – each was as bright as the sun. I’m monitoring for collateral damage.
What happened, Maura? Geoff projected.
Hang on, I’m a bit busy at the moment.
The occupants of the Unidome stopped what they were doing as the siren alarms began to wail, and then fell silent. The light panels in the Unidome flashed intermittently, and then went out. Luminous, humanoid figures skimmed through the air, some soaring up to the highest levels, some passing unhindered through walls, others diving down the vertical shaft to the quayside. The Securopa paramilitary troops responded, and the dome resonated with the whump of ion guns until their weapons disappeared from their hands.
Whatever the invading holograms touched was transformed. The control room, barracks, and OPDEO complex vaporised in seconds. In their place, neat rows of vegetables and herbs glowed in the soft illumination of battery-powered light. The occupants of the conference chamber, as well as the trainees in the classrooms, found themselves standing in coppices full of shrubs and conifers. A mill and grain hopper appeared in place of the fusion power station. In other buildings, fittings and equipment vanished without trace; workshops became storerooms for hand tools, hand pumps, arable farm implements, pens, typewriters and paper books. Art and craft materials cascaded over the desks in the office areas. The laboratories’ scientific instruments disappeared in a moment, replaced by pots and pans, needles, thread and fabrics, and musical instruments. Only the desalination plant and the basics of the living accommodation remained intact.
The Europan colonists milled around, some shouting and wailing, others as if they were in a dream. A few found their wings and flew in circles above the mêlée. OPDEO military and Securopa officers, support workers, researchers, and prisoners miraculously released from their cells rushed to and fro, frequently running into each other and falling over. But, within an hour, the Chief Engineer had found a capstan and gears driving a shaft projecting through the dome wall. He summoned a few of his staff, and together they threw their weight against the bars so that the machinery began to turn. As it gathered speed, the main lights flickered, and then shone brightly again, revealing a new world within the Unidome.
It took less than an hour to link everyone together for the League’s third Colloquium. Geoff welcomed the delegates. Word had spread quickly, and they were all aware Maura had destroyed the G-bombs. But they didn’t know how.
‘We owe a debt of gratitude to Atherlonne and Cetania, so we do,’ said Maura’s talking head. ‘They managed to drive poor old Prof Mitchell to distraction. He thought his only chance of staying sane was to steal the G-bomb design. He only had it for a minute, but I saw it all on his com-pad as he copied it in.’
‘Can you explain how the G-bombs work?’ asked General Watkins.
‘I could list the components,’ said Maura, ‘but I really think it’s information you organic creatures ought not to have. G-bombs are a genie I’d like to keep stoppered in a bottle.’
‘But how did you blow up the warheads? Did you set them off early?’ asked Yul.
‘Not at all,’ said Maura. ‘The absolute void was maintained by electrostatic and magnetic fields. The power source was a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Like most RTGs, it used Plutonium-238 as the isotope. All I had to do was juggle some neutrons around and make Plutonium-239. There was enough mass in each to go critical.’
‘But it was a hell of a risk,’ said Wally. ‘We would have been up shit creek if they’d made black holes so close to Earth.’
‘Sure,’ said Maura. ‘But I’d calculated the vacuum would decay just before the fissile material started a chain reaction. I just caused a few little nuclear explosions – nothing serious, not at all.’
Spontaneous applause broke out. As it subsided, Shan raised his hand to speak. ‘We are very grateful for all Maura has done. Can I ask what she thinks OPDEO will do next?’
‘Actually, I think they’ll have their work cut out just surviving,’ said Maura. ‘What nobody knows outside the Unidome is that they’ve been deindustrialised. You should have seen it, Geoff. I made some holograms to help me focus on the mods I carried out, and then I invaded OPDEO.’
‘Did anyone get hurt?’ asked Shan.
‘Unfortunately, some of the Securopa paramilitary troops managed to shoot each other,’ said Maura. ‘They seemed to forget their guns were only designed to damage organic matter. They couldn’t take out holograms. I intervened to stop fatalities but, I have to admit, there were some injuries. I wouldn’t have been concerned if certain characters we know had died, but my focus was to deindustrialise them, not to kill them.’
Chen spoke up. ‘You send them back to Stone Age?’
‘Not entirely,’ said Maura. ‘But from now on the occupants of the Unidome will be living a simple life.’
‘But Europa is an alien environment. How can they manage without technology?’ asked Watkins.
‘That was tricky, to be sure. I decided they couldn’t live without electricity, but from now on they’ll have to generate it manually. Actually, it’s not that onerous because I’ve moved their generators outside the dome. They’ll operate as superconductors in the extreme cold. I gave them driving shafts through the dome shell. I’ve left their existing heating system too. It pumps heat from the ocean and increases the temperature, like a fridge in reverse.’
Atherlonne:
I have a question, please. OPDEO could not bear to share the sea with Thiosh ‘aliens’, the hostile word they used to show their hate. What happened to their nuclear submarines?
‘I sank them to the seabed in a place deep enough to crush them, but still keep the reactor pressure vessel and the nuclear warheads intact,’ said Maura. ‘That way the radioactivity will be contained until it naturally decays.’
‘I believe you have followed our religion,’ said Kai. ‘You found a middle way to disable OPDEO without totally destroying it.’
‘Actually, I did a lot of destroying. All their computer equipment, mechanised transport, and their munitions. I reduced it all to a molecular level. Most of it got recycled.’
‘What happens if they fall ill?’ asked Geoff.
‘I don’t s’pose they’ll like what I’ve done,’ said Maura. ‘I removed their scanners, biometers, analysis equipment – all the electronic medical apparatus. But I’ve left them a lot of books about anatomy, herbal remedies and alternative therapy. They’ll have to find their own cures for their ailments.’
‘Will they survive, d’you think?’ asked Geoff. ‘None of them has a clue about living without technology.’
‘It depends,’ said Maura. ‘If they use the opportunity, they may find a way to live together without internal conflict. They should manage okay in the Europan environment. I’ve left them oxygen cylinders and thermal suits for outside maintenance. Sufficient to last one generation, at least.’
‘What will they do after that?’ asked Kai.
‘They’ll only have one generation,’ said Maura. ‘I gave all the men vasectomies. OPDEO won’t be threatening Earth again.’
Epilogue
Five years had passed, and Geoff and Clodagh were living quietly in Kalifornia. With some help from Atherlonne and Maura herself, Geoff had created an android to faithfully replicate Maura’s body. Using advanced animatronics, it spoke, gestured, and made facial expressions just like Maura. Geoff found it ironic that, having gone to the trouble of leaving her body, Maura had chosen to re-inhabit a facsimile. Sometimes even he forgot Maura was no longer human. The friends and relations they tracked down and visited were totally unaware of her true nature, although some did say they thought she’d changed. Geoff had been worried about Maura having to pretend to eat and drink on such occasions, but she managed to dispose of food and beverages without giving any indication she hadn’t swallowed them.
The hardest part was meeting Geoff’s sister, Georgina, again. She’d survived the war but had contracted leukaemia from the radioactive fallout. Geoff designed new bone marrow cells for her and Maura made them. Zakristan sent equipment from the TUCC for them to carry out a bone marrow transplant at home. Georgina’s Hesperian doctors had no explanation for her cure, other than it being a miracle. She knew Geoff and Maura had done it, but she didn’t know how.
As far as Clodagh was concerned, the android was her mummy. Clodagh herself was growing up fast. She was big for her age, with freckles and curly red hair. Chen was so attached to her, Geoff agreed he could live with them as a home help and odd job man. This worked out well as Geoff preferred Maura not to use her supernatural powers for plumbing and decorating. Geoff also abstained from telekinesis, because it didn’t ‘feel right’ in a domestic environment.
All their human friends and colleagues had found new occupations. The old Abbot of the Drepung monastery had passed away, and the monks had asked Kai to fill the post. Shan retired to live in the mountains, and Yul became the Khitan Secretary of State. The Sydny Institute of Astronomy invited Wally to be their Head of School, and General Watkins became President of the General Assembly of the League.
Maura had hoped the Europan colonists would find a way of living in harmony. But the bucolic idyll she’d hoped for did not materialise. Flannery ruled the Unidome like a feudal chief, rewarding his cronies, and eliminating anyone who opposed him. Breckenridge and his gang of thugs terrorised the dome’s other inhabitants. They punished anyone who would not accept Flannery’s rule by chaining them to the capstan to generate electricity. Prof, however, managed to escape this fate; he was put in charge of growing poppies for their seeds.
As Saazat, Atherlonne worked hard to heal the divisions in the Thiosh community, and Voorogg devoted himself to the same cause. Together they began a phased deindustrialisation of their society.
With General Watkins as their spokesman, the Thiosh urged the human governments to do the same. The Hesperian and Khitan leaders debated this at great length but there was little support for the proposal in their democratic assemblies. Few humans were prepared to sacrifice the comforts and benefits of a hi-tech existence.
In secret, the Hesperian and Khitan armies re-armed and developed their own design of gravity bomb. And so the arms race continued . . .
Acknowledgements
This story has taken at least four trips around the sun to write. Consequently, I’d like to express my gratitude to all who have encouraged me with grace and good humour during that protracted period: my wife, my family and the GlosInk creative writing group. I also thank my beta readers for their comments and encouragement: Steve Abbott for his blunt but accurate critique and particularly Maia Kumari Gilman who arranged for five thousand words of The Hesperian Dilemma to be included in ASEI Art’s book Anthology House, sold as a fundraiser for hurricane relief in the southern US and in the Caribbean. I’m grateful too to my editor Lesley Jones, Rachel Lawston who designed the cover and Richard Buxton whose wood cut inspired its design.
It’s inevitable that the experiences of one’s own life, and those of other people, influence the development of a story. Kai’s early years, running away, following materialistic pleasures and then a spiritual path echoes, in part, Siddhartha, the novel by Hermann Hesse, which details the spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man during the time of Gautama Buddha. Secondly, my depiction of the deprivations of Maura, Geoff and Leona as they trek across the ‘Oztralian’ bush, ‘borrows’ fairly heavily from Mutant Message Down Under by Marlo Morgan, a woman’s journey into dreamtime Australia. If you haven’t read these books then I urge you to do so.
Feedback
Dear Reader,
Although The Hesperian Dilemma was primarily meant for your entertainment, there was an underlying message, i.e. the onward march of technology is wonderful but also frightening. Things are invented and become available before their effect on society has been evaluated or even recognised. Cars, computers, phones and drones are obvious examples which spring to mind, even before we consider the weapons arsenal held by countries with varying levels of conflict with their neighbours – and nowadays all countries are effectively neighbours.
If you have any thoughts on this, or any comments about the book, please contact me via my website www.fabulahula.com
Thank you for your interest,
Colin Waterman
The Hesperian Dilemma Page 25