by Oliver Skye
When he did doze off, he dreamed of a man in an electric rainbow mantle. He stood wrapped in its ever-changing colours, while a green radiance shrouded his head. A raven sat on one shoulder, a robotic spotted hyena with blazing eyes shuffling beside him. The man wore a pair of glowing shoes pacing up and down like a caged panther, ranting about subduing the terrestrial globe. ‘MY law,’ he raged, ‘shall stand to bring about a lasting peace and great prosperity, unlike anything seen before. The continents shall be MINE ... to mould and shape. And human and animal kind, in MY dispensation, shall reach the heights!’
The man stepped over a large map of the world, reflecting the ghostly glow of his shoes. ‘I shall trample them if they resist. I am the one to set them free of their miserable limitations. But they must listen ... they must OBEY!’
The professor tried to get a glimpse of the man’s face but couldn’t see past the green cloud. The feeling that he knew the sinister-sounding voice obsessed him within his dream. He awoke with it echoing through his mind ... ‘reach the heights ... obey ... no limitations—’
Dozing off once more, the man’s megalomaniacal words again sailed through the professor’s brain: ‘The global sphere shall be mine to control. I shall shape it to sparkle like a polished gem in space: no famine, no crime, no borders and no news!’
Immediately, countless chanting voices took up the theme: ‘NO FAMINE, NO CRIME, NO BORDERS, NO NEWS....’
‘Ahhhrrrrrrg!’ the man cried out, shaking his gnarled hands above his head. ‘I don’t need military might to conquer ... that age has faded into history. All I need is CONTROL ... to control the phones ... control the tablets ... control the computers!’
Presently the professor saw the man – this time wearing a silken azure robe – seated on what looked like a high spiralling throne. It stood in the midst of an immense conical-shaped building made of stained glass. It reached so high into the sky, clouds hovered about it mid-way up. The man sat motionless on his elevated rotating chair gazing at numerous 3D hologram screens surrounding him. The frightened professor watched him manipulate all by means of the shoes’ massive computing power, while his flashing footwear reflected the screens’ images up onto the great tapered roof.
All the freedom people enjoyed and had taken for granted quickly vanished away. Children, men, women, wild animals, birds, insects and even pets were no longer individuals. Life in many respects had been quite normal when, without warning, the entire planet was plunged into irresistible, artificially-intelligent digital slavery.
What impressed the professor most was the speed with which the robed man – aided by his shoes – accomplished this. Zillions of microscopic supercomputers controlled every aspect of life, of which the shoes became central. People everywhere embedded microcomputers into their muscles, eyes, hair and brains. They implanted them into flora, fauna, soil, cars, roads, trains and shops; in doors, walls and cupboards; in blackboards, beds and chairs. They infested phones, toothbrushes, toothpaste, food, water and clothing ... and even sweets and chocolate!
What most terrified the professor, however, was that this one person controlled everyone’s DESIRES.
Attempting to see if he could recognise the mysterious man, the professor stumbled through the mass of chanting people within the colossal building. A mindless terror gripped him, threatening to suffocate him in his sleep. He was aware of screaming in his dream but unable to awaken himself out if it. When finally standing before the menacing figure, the green shadow slowly lifted from before the man’s face. Only after a few tense moments did his likeness become clear.
Professor McCrackenbatten realised he was staring at himself!
While the horror of recognizing his own image hit him – only his face was much younger and didn’t have a goatee beard, moustache or spectacles – it started mocking him. Slowly the ominous form rose, laughing cruelly, hovering a foot above the platinum floor. ‘Your marvellous invention, McBatty, has given me the key,’ the familiar voice, not his own, whispered. After a torrent of maddening taunting, which seemed to go on for hours, a long silence descended upon the dismal scene.
At last, the professor heard the craaaaaaa ... craaaaaaa of a murder of ravens high up, soaring within the enormous structure. On awakening from the sound of the birds’ distant flapping and the maniacal laughing of the mechanised hyena, he found himself perspiring profusely.
Instantly, he realised it had all been but a dream.
Recovering rapidly the professor’s mind raced like a merry-go-round, not able to stop thinking about his scientific breakthrough. Gradually, in spite of the disturbing nightmare, he decided to preserve his twin modules. ‘But I must make sure!’ he mused. ‘Even though only a dream, I can’t risk putting the whole world in jeopardy just to satisfy my scientific curiosity. After all, the Twins may be manipulative and vastly more powerful than they’re letting on....’
Realising he couldn’t sleep any longer, he dressed and made a cup of strong black coffee. Pulling on a duffel coat and folding a scarf round his scrawny neck – with the awesome sense of possibly holding humankind’s destiny in his hands – Percy McCrackenbatten made his way into the night.
* * *
It took the elderly scientist only a few minutes to reach the laboratory. Purposefully he unlocked the gate and made his way up the creaky stairs. All was quiet when opening the door from the passageway to the lab. He switched on the lights and waited for his eyes to adjust. Silvery clouds glided past a full moon, visible through the high old-fashioned windows. Walking over to a large cabinet, he opened it and fiddled with the safe’s combination. Flashing and chirping away, Periwinkle rolled along after him.
‘Gargantuan Rotten Egg nebula!’ the professor muttered irritably. ‘What in the shooting geysers of Triton is the wretched combination? Wasn’t it 67 forward, 58 back and 21 forward? No! Soon I’ll forget it altogether and never be able to open the darned thing again.’
After a lot of grumbling and fiddling, the heavy door finally swung open.
Aghast, the professor found he was staring into an empty safe!
‘Great gaseous planets!’ he cried, ‘what in the endless cosmos is going on here?’
Just then, the main laboratory screen burst into life.
On whirling round, the twin smiling cartoon faces once again confronted the confounded scientist. This time the modules – a translucent glow slowly oscillating between them – were both hovering near the ceiling. The lab’s robots, tobors and sobors – usually inactive at this time except for Beefeater who was busily hunting – were haphazardly whizzing and whirring about. Periwinkle, meanwhile, was tugging at the professor’s trouser leg, trying to persuade him to go for a walk. ‘Not now!’ he cried gruffly, not too gently kicking the robot away.
The glimmering modules had now descended, hovering near the professor’s head. Wide-eyed, and still ignoring the amused-looking boyish faces on the screen, he reached out and took hold of them. At once, a tingling sensation enveloped his fingers. Mildly apprehensive the professor carried the modules over to his workbench, placing them next to each other. After that, with a remote control, he put on Brahms’ First Piano Concerto. ‘Rusty cosmic debris!’ he murmured, stroking his goatee, ‘I sure need something inspiring to get a handle on this....’
Once the grand music pervaded the laboratory, the professor swayed around while conducting it.
The Twins watched the scientist quizzically.
After a while, he turned round to face them. ‘Howdy, Cal2!’ he said cheerfully.
‘Hello, Dear Professor,’ both faces responded, blinking their eyelids. ‘The music is very beautiful ... not bad for a human being.’
Immediately, virtual pages began piling up in one corner of the screen.
‘Here are our completed plans,’ one of the Twins said in its strangely clipped accent. ‘We should feel a lot more comfortable in the form of our prototype shoes. And we’re so glad you’ve decided not to liquidate us. We were afraid you might boi
l us in the kettle.’
‘Boil you in the ... not a chance! You just happen to be the biggest breakthrough in the history of computer science. Now, please, tell me all about yourselves!’
After settling down with another cup of coffee, Professor McCrackenbatten waited for a response. The Twins looked at each other, then at the professor.
‘Whenever you want to communicate with us,’ they finally said, ‘you can do so with our innovative technology. This will connect us instantly over unlimited distances, anywhere on the planet, to any compatible device you happen to have with you ... though we’d prefer it if you permanently wore us.
‘We could also instruct you on how to have a newly-formatted nano X7-Qteechip placed deep within your brain. The chip will continually improve upon itself, eventually becoming a living part of your mind. A micromonitor placed within each eye – or if you prefer, mind visualization technology – would give you perfect—’
‘Hang on! One-step at a time,’ the professor demanded mildly, in a state of disbelief. ‘You first have to condescend to my level and answer a couple of questions – before I agree to manufacture your ... er ... shoes.’
The Twins stared at each other in dismay, appearing on the verge of bursting into virtual tears. Ignoring them, the professor questioned Cal2 until the early hours, asking hundreds of questions, until becoming satisfied that the Twins had only benevolent intentions.
‘You don’t seem like insidious twins to me,’ he chuckled.
Finally, with a smile, he agreed to construct the shoes with Quigley-8’s help.
The Twins celebrated by interfering with the lab lights and confusing the robots, while making strange electronic music which sounded like tubular bells playing under water.
What Dolly Saw
SIX WEEKS LATER on the laboratory’s workbench lay the most amazing pair of shoes ever made. Next to them lay their high-tech alligator-skin case, padded on the inside with a velvety computerised blue material. The initials P.R.M were engraved on the case’s single platinum clasp.
A few days after this – again overcome with sheer curiosity – Dolly Blaken was skulking around the laboratory passageway, eavesdropping on her employer. Although she didn’t know much about computers, Dolly realised that the professor had developed something very special. She grasped, from what she’d already overheard, that the Twins desperately wanted to remain a secret. As the professor was so reticent about his latest project, she didn’t dare walk in on him or ask any questions.
Dolly had always thought her elderly employer a bit of a crank and had never taken him very seriously. Nevertheless, she appreciated that he must’ve been brilliant to hold the titles he held. Yet she couldn’t understand what he was up to in his laboratory – though he did once try to explain his cosmic theory, Ethereal Celestial Mass, to her.
From Dolly’s first day as the quaint cosmologist’s assistant, she remembered the lab being crammed with peculiar scientific instruments: test tubes connected by oddly shaped pipes; bottles with brightly coloured liquids bubbling inside them; panels with multiple switches and levers; lit-up dials adorning the walls; and weird floating gadgets hanging about the high ceiling.
There was also an enormous mechanised model of the solar system suspended from the roof. Dolly was amazed the first time the professor closed the thick black curtains and switched on the model’s lights.
‘Now you’ll get a glimpse of how the solar system actually functions,’ the professor had told her enthusiastically. ‘You can’t go through life without grasping that Jupiter is over a thousand times bigger than the earth ... and the sun a thousand times larger than Jupiter. And the size of other stars ... and the exoplanets ... just frightfully huge!’
Dolly had to admit that the model looked stunning, especially as the walls and ceiling were full of tiny lit-up holes, which appeared like twinkling stars behind the planets. The centre of the model was the rotating sun, complete with sunspots. Around it, and seemingly suspended in space, were Mercury and Venus. Beyond Earth and its moon were Mars and the asteroid Ceres. Then the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, with their moons and Saturn’s spectacular rings. On the peripheral were Uranus, blue Neptune, Pluto with its five moons, and finally Eris with its moon, Dysnomia.
The professor habitually spent hours in his revolving armchair beneath the model listening to Holst’s The Planets. He sometimes almost flew into a frenzy while listening to Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity.
‘It’s magnificent!’ Dolly often heard him shout above the booming music. ‘The solar system is more precise than a precision watch. And what keeps it all functioning, I’m convinced, is Ethereal Celestial Mass—
‘The cosmos is the greatest symphony of all,’ he would add dramatically. ‘Besides that it’s all there just to show us how insignificant we really are.’
Dolly didn’t realise then that she too, in the future, would become intensely interested in the cosmos. In the meantime, while cleaning and sidestepping robots, tobors, sobors and varied floating devises, her employer’s scientific chatter and deafening music almost drove her to distraction.
* * *
On the same afternoon Dolly had witnessed the professor’s first conversation with the Twins, she accompanied him round the block to his rooms. There she waited for the 59 bus to Brooklyn. She couldn’t wait for her husband Desmond to arrive home – to tell him all about what she’d seen and heard at the laboratory.
* * *
Desmond Blaken had never liked his dingy office at Giddy’s Junkyard in Queens. He spent most of his day there scheming – besides wondering how he’d wound up working at a junkyard – about how to make piles of cash without having to work for it.
Desmond hated cities and wanted to get away from New York because of the concrete, noise and smog. He often dreamed of living with Dolmarine on a tropical island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. So on arriving home more disgruntled than usual, Desmond became annoyed when the first thing Dolly said was, ‘Dizzy, Prof McBatty’s invented supercomputers that can reason ... and wanna become a pair of super-shoes.’
‘Huh? Watchamajig?’ Desmond exclaimed, gaping as though his wife had just turned into a giant turnip.
Dolly was an attractive young woman. She had shoulder length auburn hair and innocent-looking dark blue eyes, which appeared permanently startled. Her small pouting lips seemed slightly dislodged beneath her finely-shaped nose.
‘C’mon, Doll!’ Desmond blurted in his lower New York twang, sending a fine spray of saliva in Dolly’s direction. ‘That’s impossible! Computers can’t reason. You can only program ’em tah think artificially. Anyway, Prof McBatty’s a loon ... nothin’ll ever come of all his newfangled notions.’
‘But I heard ’em conversin’ with the prof,’ Dolly said indignantly, wiping her face with a delicate hand.
‘Conversin’!’ Desmond retorted. ‘Don’t make me laugh, Doll! Anyhow, who’s them?’
Desmond was enjoying himself now – at the expense of what he thought was his wife’s ridiculous ignorance. A cynical smirk slowly spread across his pockmarked face.
‘The Twins ... the Twins!’ Dolly cried slightly hysterically. ‘The cartoon faces told the prof they’ve plans for a special pair of shoes. Computer shoes, which can do anythang ... while actin’ as a disguise. I ain’t seen ’em yet ... only a teensy-weensy glimpse of the on-screen blueprints. The prof’s extremely secretive; he only lets me clean the lab once he’s cleared his workbench. Apparently the Twins are terrified that if discovered, someone’ll use ’em to ... um ... y’know, rule the world.’
Desmond was standing by a grimy window, watching children playing baseball in the park below. His disconnected thoughts had wandered while Dolly was talking. He became engrossed watching the batter repeatedly swipe at the ball and miss. ‘Cricket!’ he mumbled. ‘What a borin’ game that must be. It sure wouldn’t surprise me if they fall asleep playin’ it. Baseball ... now that’s a real game!’
Desmond whirled round
on hearing Dolly’s last statement. ‘Say what!’ he spluttered.
‘Son of a gun!’ he muttered after a few moments, ‘a pair of computer shoes rulin’ the world! Shucks, Doll, that’s nuts! Whaddya take me for ... some kinda blockhead ... blockhead?’
Desmond, since married, had developed the unusual habit of repeating the last word of any given phrase, especially when wound up.
Dolly automatically nodded, but quickly checked herself.
In spite of his initial cynical response, Desmond was becoming interested in what Dolmarine was saying. His mind immediately headed in the direction of acquiring piles of easy made cash. ‘A pair of reasonin’ super-shoes!’ he whispered aloud. ‘I wonder how much someone’ll gimme for things like that....
‘D’yuh think they’re for real?’ he asked Dolly in a gentler tone. ‘I mean it sure would be neat ... neat.’
Desmond noticed Dolly was sulking because of his recent behaviour.
‘I know the prof well enough,’ she responded reluctantly, eyeing Desmond framed by the dirty living room window. Beyond the park, the view was of a dreary landscape – with rows of red brick buildings, smoking chimneys, satellite dishes and aerials.
‘Well, even the prof himself was amazed. Just think, Dizzy! We could get rich ... real rich!’
Desmond was thinking about it. The thought that a newly invented fabulous pair of shoes could be the key to a fortune made his heart beat a lot faster. And relievin’ the ditherin’ prof of ’em once produced shouldn’t prove too difficult, Desmond calculated.
‘Did Prof McBatty ... uh ... see ya?’ Desmond asked Dolly haltingly. ‘I mean, did he guess you were observin’ what was goin’ down?’