“A lunatic has hijacked a 777 full of passengers en route from Buenos Aires to Johannesburg, demanding to be taken to Dvalin. When the pilot refused, he was strangled. The man has since locked himself in the cockpit with the co-pilot and continues to demand mid-air refuelling and passage to Dvalin.” The bad, the worse, the disastrous and the totally fucking crazy. What next?
“Three global banks have suffered massive cyber attacks. Two received viruses which caused significant harm to their mainframes, while another was hacked so comprehensively that the CEO’s email was accessed and forwarded to millions of inboxes around the world. Cyber information security has been called ‘a joke’ in numerous media. Hackers are coming out of the woodwork, sensing the end of the system.”
I stood, slightly wobbly, teeth clenched. “OK, Hal. That’ll do.”
He was silent. The group, stunned and sombre, waited for me to collect myself. Harvey Jones spoke for them. “Tough couple of days”.
“It’ll be a tough few years”, added Raphael de Clerk. His specialism was adult education but he had also written on societal stability under pressure; his book Mob Rule: Democracy in the Internet Age was in every university library in the world. “There is a lot of confusion now, but it’ll settle”.
The sole voice of optimism, I noticed. Others voiced concern after concern, the temperature gradually rising as members of the group began to talk over each other. Old issues fused with new; ideologies and personalities formed a hypergolic cocktail. Within minutes I knew useful work would be useless. Then Julia Fitzwallace virtually ran up to me, slapped me really hard across the face, and yelled, “brainless cunt!”
I clicked my fingers.
Hal and I had organized this plan well in advance of Dvalin’s arrival. If ever I was onboard Dvalin and my fingers clicked, that meant ‘get me out of here, right now’. The best version of it, given the limited orbital relocation network, was to Relocate me directly to the cockpit of Phoenix, which had remained docked to Dvalin overnight. As in all my Relocations, I had been somewhere, and now I was somewhere else. There was no journey or delay. The warm, quiet cockpit surrounded me, bringing back a flood of memories from my long cruise back from Takanli. I’d experienced the late sixties in this spacecraft. And now it was going to take me away from the maelstrom I had created, the huge cataclysm I had ignited on my home planet. I was rat, fleeing the sinking ship, the only one with the technology to do so. And the only one truly to blame.
As sad as ever I have felt, heart sunk low in my chest and eyes welling with tears, I bid the Cruiser forward out of its docking latches and edged away from the asteroid. Too depressed even to take enjoyment from flying, I told Hal where I wanted to go and gave him a short sequence of equipment requirements for the replicators and foragers to work on. Then I slumped down into the pilot’s seat, watched the ravaged earth recede, and tried to blot out the images of violence and anarchy which were playing themselves out, like a movie on loop, in front of my eyes.
What an idiot.
Chapter XLVI: Sojourn
Saturday, 15th October, 2033
Approaching Tsiolkovski Crater, Lunar Far Side
I had been out for nearly twenty hours, my longest sleep since hibernating on the Phoenix all those years ago. I had considered placing myself back in the sleeping chamber and sending the Cruiser into a lazy, heliocentric orbit; Hal would be instructed to wake me when earth returned to normalcy. It might be forty more years. Or four thousand. Or never. I was glum, have no doubt about it.
The Cruiser had been silent for most of the three-day journey. Rather than zipping into the moon’s influence at my usual lightspeed pace, I had told Hal to take an Apollo-type slow-rolling cruise; the steadier pace helped ease my nerves. I ate, slept, planned the coming retreat, and tried not to think about home. Hal was banned from reporting anything other than nuclear calamity, and thank God, none of those had yet disturbed our quiet cruise to the moon. I floated in the zero-G, which kept me weightless and thoughtless. It was the best state to be in. The alternatives were all too painful.
The moon’s glowing white splendour greeted me through the cabin windows. Curving away under me, at once utterly alien and reassuringly familiar, the craters and dry oceans of the lunar near side gleamed in the direct sunlight. Unfiltered by atmosphere, the light here was serenely special; reflecting off the moon’s bright rocks, I found I could read without interior illumination, just using the ambient moonshine.
Hal began a low-throttle burn of the Cruiser’s nuclear engines, to bring us into an initial lunar orbit. Our target was one of the most distinctive, and beautiful craters on the moon’s far side. I chuckled whenever I thought of it by its popular name, the dark side... as if no sunlight ever shone there! When asked in the street, four out of ten earthlings had agreed it was perpetually dark. Just one more way in which our schools had failed us. I winced, rejecting the thought. The only contemplation I was prepared to permit myself was the reassurance that, come what may, things would improve. No news was good news.
Phoenix carried out a sequence of braking manoeuvres to bring us into a much lower orbit, almost grazing the surface as we approached the crater. Tsiolkovski is a gorgeous piece of the moon; a dark, flat lava bed at the centre of concentric rings of ejecta, thrown out by a huge impact billions of years ago. The remnants of the asteroid which struck this part of the moon are preserved, like a rocky island, at the centre of the lava plain. The effect is nothing so much as viewing an alien island surrounded by dark, bottomless water.
Hal gave me a tour, circling the crater and approaching from north and south, allowing me to choose our landing site; I already knew roughly where I wanted to be. On the south side of the mountainous island was a long, tall ridge line which seemed to offer a views right across both the island and the crater; it was the tallest vantage point for miles. I donned my excursion suit, a huge upgrade over the Apollo-era suits, and waited for Hal to organize a neat, pinpoint landing at the western edge of the ridge line. The horizon came up to meet us, flattening from its customary curve – one can view the moon’s curvature at a much lower altitude than that of the earth, given its smaller size – and Phoenix made her first lunar landing on this remote, isolated hill in a quiet lunar backwater. Perfect.
My first stroll on the ridgeline was a cursory inspection of the Cruiser followed by some sight-seeing. From this island of rock, I could see across the broad, flat, dark lava plain of the crater, past its jutting, rocky perimeter, and into the open spaces of the lunar landscape beyond. Phoenix glimmered confidently in the unfettered sunlight, strange and beautiful atop this alien hill. The loneliness of the place was almost overwhelming; nothing had happened here, until my recent arrival, for many millions of years. The only events, impacts from deep space, were so infrequent that one could stand on this ridge for a thousand lifetimes and never see one. What a sight that would be, I mused to myself – a giant, symmetrical plume of dust and rock many miles high, radiating out and then falling gracefully back. I wished for nothing nearly that exciting during my stay here as the thirteenth man to walk on the moon. However long it was going to be.
Back in the ship, I slept again. My dreams were disturbed and fractious, unusual for me. Most seemed centred around unsolvable conundrums or uncrackable codes, as if my subconscious was quietly working on a problem. No surprises there.
I had a limited appetite, certainly compared to my demolition lunches and six course dinners back on earth. I read dozens of books, works I’d wanted to read for years but never found the time. I even chose to read sections at what you’d call ‘normal’ speed, not my accustomed twelve-pages-a-minute pace.
I slung a hammock across the cabin of the Phoenix and spent hours stretched out, breathing and letting my mind wander. It was peaceful, but never entirely so; any reminder of the chaos back home was a thumb-tack piercing of my calm, lunar bubble. Each time it took several minutes to return to a calm state, where my troubled mind might find some rest, and some space.
Days passed. I began longer, more complex dialogues with Hal. Perhaps it was boredom, I reasoned, or just the need for companionship. The cranky mega-genius had, almost from the start, embodied a strange combination of enforcer, psychologist and Cambridge professor, and these personality traits were certainly becoming more embedded. His speech became gradually more natural and less digitally laconic, while his sense of humour – and I’m talking about a relationship of many years, you’ll remember – developed very, very slowly.
I strolled on the moon, most days that I was there. The lower gravity was fun, but mostly I was there for the quiet and the absolute certainty of privacy.
More days passed.
Chapter XLVII: Incoming
Thursday, January 19th, 2034
Tsiolkovski Crater, Lunar Far Side
If I had ever wondered how a genius super-computer would react to three months of boredom, I was starting now to see how bizarre things could get. Hal went through mood cycles, expressed verbally in part, but seen mainly in his construction projects and future planning. Bored robots do a shit-load of future planning.
Hal had conceived a plan which involved harnessing together a dozen large asteroids with carbon filaments, spinning the whole assembly to create gravity, packing it with habitable space and stores, and sending it off to the nearest star using a gigantic solar sail. He had gotten as far as picking the asteroids and selecting a top six potential trajectories for a science ship to go and get the project started.
He wrote a book each week, sometimes two. These were largely on the level of PhD physics or chemistry theses, but he writes broadly. One of his most recent books was a critique of Goldman Sachs, the long-defunct investment house, which used what one reviewer would later call ‘a giant, meticulously combed-through data pile’ to present a compelling case of capitalism’s inherent vulnerabilities.
He kept me posted about the earth. I’d become able to digest the news as the situation improved and worldwide violence levels began to drop. The replicators had been a huge success, and communities were generally self-policing on matters of common ownership; arbitration was a growth industry. There had also been the first stirrings of what’s now known as the ‘Great Expanse’ movement (GE to its initiates; another defunct firm sported the same letters once, but one feels this movement has a greater chance of longevity). A global 23% drop in TV-watching and video games produced a welter of social benefits, encouraged by the free distribution of electricity to cars, using entirely renewable energy. Replicators had quickly been pressed into use in creating thousands of small, portable fusion reactors which were gradually taking over supply of the world’s ceaseless demand for energy.
I had read nearly a thousand books and listened to three months of new music, from Algerian folk through Danish Goth metal to Finnish spectralism. I wrote a good chunk of this manuscript, slept ten natural hours every night, meditated and worked out daily, and kept to a vegan diet, plus some pills. Hal said I was physically in the best condition of my life; mentally, well that was something else. It was hard to feel like I hadn’t wrecked planet earth in some way, even if things were slowly coming around. There was guilt; some regret. A lot of confusion.
I moved out of the Phoenix into a shelter the size of a basketball court with hermetically sealed, variably textured windows and ceiling, so I could sleep under the stars, or under a roof, as I chose. My patrols of the crater expanded to the whole region of the lunar southern hemisphere. I climbed mountains, placed experiments, raised a bio-dome to grow crops in lunar soil. I played the part of a man at leisure in his country manor, tending the garden and reading cosmology or philosophy in his conservatory. Hal more than once made a Silent Running quip; all I needed was the little robots and I’d be just as nutty as Bruce Dern’s solitary spaceman.
I had time. Perhaps too much. My thoughts wandered frequently to sex, to past loves – Falik, and sometimes Gemma – wondering what they were doing at that moment, if they were OK. If they were being loved by someone. If they were dead. Ach. I did my best not to think of Takanli, as my desire to return there had only been magnified by the earth’s messy reaction to Dvalin. They’d have loved this project, I thought to myself. Bold, logical, efficient; they’d let me bring a whole fleet of rocks into Takanli orbit and cause as much revolutionary expansion as I wanted. I could take Falik up there and bone her on a whole new planet.
I missed her smile, her laugh. Her body. Her delicious little breasts, just a perfect mouthful. The dark, cute triangle of hair that hid her pussy. The perfect, slender shape of her torso. The hot, tight confines of her ass. I found myself masturbating, thinking only of her, every few days. My heavy, seldom-emptied balls welcomed the release each time with a massive torrent of sperm.
I thought about Gemma. There was just nothing to explain it. She backed off and backed off, citing past relationship disasters, not wanting to get too close, or emotionally entangled. It wasn’t as if I’d proposed to her, or even talked seriously about moving in together. I mean, my lifestyle was totally insane. I couldn’t expect anyone to tolerate my schedule, the demands on my time and attention, or the burgeoning fame which would add even more madness to an already complex life. But she had just gone. I called her for weeks without response. I staked out her place, but she had obviously moved, and done so in such a hurry that it amazed her neighbours. Just gone.
What could have freaked her out like that? What about her desire to finish university? What about what we were building together, and the tremendous sex we’d had? I’d taken her ice-diving on Jupiter’s moon, Europa, and in the end even that hadn’t, well, cut any ice. It was upsetting, mystifying and disappointing in equal measure. I felt a lot like I had been dumped for no reason.
I distracted myself with projects and books. One of Hal’s better ideas was to manufacture and launch deep-space telescopes, radio-receivers and laser-reflectors. Strapped to a nuclear power source, each unit was dispatched into a solar orbit and tasked with scanning a particular patch of sky. The results were correlated and all manner of discoveries were pouring in, and I ravenously consumed the latest data each morning. Although the Takanli star catalogues listed every star in the Milky Way, they had limited data on the planets or their moons, and there were millions upon millions of them. Hal’s robot explorers photographed numerous earth-like planets, interrogating their spectrograms for signs of chlorophyll, oxygen or other telltale signs of life. So far, he was hopping with excitement but refused to confirm the presence of life without a much closer inspection. A host of inter-stellar probes was on the drawing board.
Then, just after new year 2034, which saw the only alcohol of my stay on the moon, Hal piped up with an emergency warning. I had a few seconds’ utter panic, fearing the Earth had regressed into calamity once more, but his voice was calm. And he had some staggering news.
“I’m gathering data on an object which is new to the catalogue”. This was extremely unusual. Hal had been compiling a comprehensive list of every piece of rock, defunct satellite, even each speck of old, flaked paint from the shuttle. Together, they formed the Index of Space Objects which ran into the billions and was available for free on the Web. It was supposed to contain orbital characteristics and general data on every object in the solar system larger than 2cm across. And this new object was significantly larger.
“Tell me what you have, Hal”. I was having lunch at the time, and the importance of the discovery was highlighted by Hal’s uncharacteristic interruption of my afternoon meal.
“I need a lot more data”, he warned, “but preliminary extrapolations lead to the conclusion that this object has originated outside of the solar system, and is heading into a heliocentric orbit.”
I mulled over the possibilities. Comets arrive, ancient and unpredictable, from the Oort cloud, a massive family of icy fragments so far from the sun that even Hal struggled to catalogue its members. This could be an uncharted comet, obeying the sun’s mighty command to come hither. “Something t
ells me, Hal, that you’re not surveying a new chunk of Oort ice here. What do you know?”
There was a pause. You could say, without exaggeration, that I had been waiting many years for what he said next. “The object appears to be slowing”.
Lunch was abandoned. I was up, punching buttons, grabbing coffee, awakening long-dormant mental circuits. “Get in touch with it, Hal. Send probes. I want maximum data”.
Comets do not slow down as they approach the sun; quite the reverse. As Hal refined his data on the mass and density of the object, it was clear that this was a spacecraft, and one which had travelled an immensity to be with us. During the rest of the afternoon, Hal did his best to track back the ship’s likely trajectory, taxing even his abundant computing power, in an attempt to establish it’s point of origin.
“I have a rough correlation. You might want to sit down”. My heart leapt in my chest as I interpreted the display. The region was instantly familiar.
Holdrian.
The time-travelling, space-bending geniuses had sent another ship towards earth. It’s approach trajectory was almost identical to my own – a light-speed coast followed by a gentle slowing as the ship entered the solar system, culminating in an arrival into earth orbit.
Someone had followed me to earth.
My mind whirled. Who was it? One of my first thoughts, curiously, was that the President of Holdrian had become impatient waiting for me to bring Stephen Hawking to meet their science team, and had simply decided to come and get him. Then I wondered if it might somehow be a future version of myself, come to deliver a warning. The possibilities were infinite.
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