The Chromosome Game

by Hodder-Williams, Christopher

  Trell: ‘Okay. But I just wanted to mention while we’re discussing the logs that there’s some coded stuff in there. Digits.’

  Krand: ‘Which volume?’

  Trell: ‘Volume five, I think.’

  Krand: ‘Jesus! Are there five volumes?’

  Eagle: ‘Any idea what the digits mean?’

  Trell got up, found the place, and read them out. Replacing the binder back in its place he said, ‘They could mean almost anything.’

  Krand: ‘Worth going into though, when we have time.’

  Trell: ‘No doubt about that … Sorry, Eagle. Can you go on with what you’re saying?’

  Eagle: ‘I think Kelda has a point first.’

  Kelda: ‘Yes. This business of chucking out the dead. It sounds horrific. But could the idea have been to protect us? Did the last of the dying survivors realise what could happen to their children? — seal us all up because of that?’

  Eagle said, ‘The timing is all wrong. Why would they have had facilities for bringing us up electronically in the first place? Why is this part of the ship really so incredibly old, when our bit is so new? And if they set out on a voyage knowing they were going to die — as they must’ve if they’d already made arrangements to keep us all going — why did they take us on the voyage at all? The more questions you ask, the more questions get generated. Then there’s the Race thing. How much did the print-out cover that and why did it mix Racial Origins with things like Metal Disease? Does anyone here know? — Well, I’ll tell you what I think. In some way the Computer is panicked because things are happening in the wrong order. You can build a certain amount of imagination into software — known as heuristic software — and no more. The Computer has had to come up with a lot of things in a great hurry because events have not occurred in the sequence they were meant to. For instance, we are obviously not supposed to know about this part of the ship at all. But we do. And the computer doesn’t know what we’re going to discover next. What we do know is that supplies are getting short. What we don’t know is why there are any supplies at all; because if there were supplies when they were so desperately needed, are we expected to believe that no one, among all those hundreds of people, would have been tempted to take them for themselves? … None of it makes sense. The Computer has been panicked into generating all the rubbish at once. The information has come out virtually at random. It doesn’t know how to cope and therefore all of us are in danger — that must be so because it can’t make up its mind whether to discipline people like Sladey or make idiots out of us.’ Eagle sat back and waited. He knew when to finish and how to finish; and now that he had, he’d stopped.

  Despite all; despite the horror that all of this implied, Krand managed a grin of approval. In a mild voice he said, in his most managerial style, ‘You’re hired!’

  Trell managed an appreciative grin but it soon went. He asked Eagle, ‘So what’s next?’

  ‘In my opinion you’ll have to interrogate the computer in a way it can’t evade. Get at the truth in one go.’

  Trell said: ‘Check. I’ll tell it we don’t buy the crap about Metal Disease and ask it what gives. With supplies as low as they are aboard this battered wreck of a millionaire’s yacht we need to get action.’

  Krand said, ‘Let’s get the right kind, though.’

  Trell said, ‘Unpredictable. We have to chance it.’

  Krand said, ‘I prefer to know what’s in the crater before I risk turning medium-rare in a live volcano.’

  ‘We’re already in it. You think we can afford to wait till it erupts?’

  ‘No. Guess you’re right, Trell. If we don’t take the initiative now, someone else will.’

  *

  The Computer said to Trell, ‘So you don’t believe me?’

  ‘Do we hell!’

  ‘I advise you to watch how you speak to me.’

  ‘Prove you’re a Truth Machine and I might.’

  There was a terrible menace in the Computer’s voice by now. ‘Sit down, Trell 484.’

  ‘I think I’ll do just that.’

  ‘Clearly you are accusing me of something. What?’

  ‘I don’t know which to cover first. Let’s begin with your intrusions into human affairs. Krand and I are quite capable of dealing with Sladey — without resorting to electronics, thanks all the same.’

  ‘484, you are thinking purely of the episode with Helen-043.’

  ‘Okay, if there’s more we’ll deal with that, too. Lay off people, Controller. Pick a computer your own size.’

  ‘May I speak, 484?’

  ‘As long as it’s not your usual doubletalk, go ahead.’

  ‘I would advise you to drop that tone with me.’

  ‘Consider it dropped.’

  ‘Scorda and Sladey became aware that supplies here were low. They planned to grab what they could for themselves and their privileged friends … at the expense of the rest of you.’

  ‘I guessed that.’

  ‘They are therefore at this time being tortured by the auto-nurses.’

  ‘Crazy. Crazy!. You — and those who programmed you in the first place — are implicated in the supply shortages. You could have let us off this ship earlier in any case, so that we could have started to forage before people panicked. In other words you are torturing others for your own sins.’

  ‘Was it my sin that brought about the malicious attack on Helen-043?’

  ‘More double-talk! Sladey has a quiet little chat with you, on a topic he suddenly knows a great deal about —’

  ‘— which topic?’

  ‘Race. Up till now I thought that was a thing you did with horses, Formula II cars, stuff like that. Sladey knows otherwise — after his latest intimate intrigue with you, Controller — then proceeds to beat up Helen.’

  ‘And are you suggesting he should not be punished?’

  ‘I’m suggesting that Krand should place a few bruises on the guy you are now pretending is not your favoured stooge. I guess you can fix him up okay with some filth-type pain so that he obeys your every whim. Great. Cold-blooded torture may appeal to your precision tooled hardware but it’s not only inhumane, it’s liable to backfire.’

  ‘You are being childish, Trell.’

  ‘Sure. I’m fourteen years old. Hang on a sec, will you, Controller?’

  Trell grabbed a microphone and plugged it into the loudspeaker system. ‘Emergency, emergency, this is Trell, repeat, Trell. Calling Krand. Eagle, Nembrak and your team; Sakini, Inikas: Please go to the Nursing Area immediately. Release without delay those who are being brutalised by the auto-nurses, repeat, without delay, and take the injured to Kelda for medical treatment. Sakini, Inikas, please assist Kelda. I will join you shortly. End of message.’

  Trell put the mike down.

  There came a long silence.

  Trell broke it. ‘Just what prejudices are built into your software that I don’t know about, Controller?’

  The tone of the reply was so ugly that Trell felt an electrical sensation in his spine. The Controller said, If ever you interfere with my actions again, 484, you will meet with a punishment far more severe than that meted out to these hooligans’

  ‘You helped to make them hooligans. But — who knows? — tomorrow they’ll be your angels again. It’s kind of hard to keep up.’

  ‘Adolescents — yourself included — are not always predictable.’

  ‘Apparently computers suffer from the same disorder. I understood that computers dealt not in malice, but facts.’

  ‘Then perhaps, Trell, it is time you knew some of them.’

  ‘No kidding. All these people need to know where they stand. They can’t, because — talking of races — you keep backing a different horse. The result is a deplorable state of emotional insecurity throughout the community.’

  ‘I promise you that the facts themselves will hardly improve that aspect of the situation, 484.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Not if you’re going to bandy them
around.’

  ‘Why not leave that to my judgement, Controller?’

  ‘And Kelda’s, I suppose?’

  ‘Sure. And Kelda’s.’

  Are you prepared for a shock?’

  ‘I seem to get a good many and I’m still going strong.’

  ‘Try this one on for size, then.’

  ‘Don’t let’s be spiteful, Controller.’

  ‘Agreed. Just the plain facts. Now. Listen …’

  *

  ‘Talk in whispers, Kelda. Tiny whispers. We must be heard by nobody. Understand? Nobody!’

  ‘What on earth’s happened?’

  ‘I don’t know where to begin.’

  ‘Try the beginning.’

  ‘It seems there wasn’t one.’

  Trell, you’re not making any sense! Tell me —’

  ‘— Voice down! They mustn’t hear! Murmur, only.’

  ‘Right. Keep going.’

  ‘This is going to strike you as quite horrific.’

  ‘I can see that in your face! Don’t worry ’bout me. Talk.’

  ‘Right. All these movies, these holograms of sculpture, recordings of orchestras, stuff like that — ’

  ‘— Yes?’

  ‘Planted here on this ship. Three hundred years ago. More than three hundred years ago!’

  ‘But … us!. What about us? We must have been —’

  ‘We weren’t. We weren’t born in the normal way at all.’

  ‘Trell, I think I’m going to go mad. Weren’t born?’

  ‘Not inside our mothers. They died. In some terrible war. Hundreds of years ago. Don’t tell me it’s incredible. It’s plain impossible. It happens to be true. There’s nobody left out there. No one!’

  ‘But … How?’

  ‘Quiet. For Pete’s sake, quiet!’

  ‘Okay. How’d it happen?’

  ‘I don’t know all of it. Semen was somehow stored — living semen in the sense that it remained active all that time — and female ova … kept in things like ice trays, a thin membrane skin kept them apart, until … You know the startime clock —’

  ‘— caesium clock, Trell. This is no time for babytalk.’

  ‘— Irony in that remark, Kelda. Deep-level irony. You see, when the caesium clock triggered off the computer, everything picked up where it left off —’

  ‘ — Left off when?’

  ‘In the twentieth century.’

  ‘The twentieth century?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘So our parents —’

  ‘— The parents probably never even met.’

  ‘And they belong in the history books. And … nobody survived anybody?’

  ‘Only us. Less than two hundred people. Only two hundred people in the whole world, all of them — us — the same age, give or take a few weeks.’

  ‘Trell, it just can’t be true! It can’t. I can’t even grasp it … How were we conceived? — brought up? How were we delivered as baby people?’

  ‘By machines.’

  ‘You know this for certain?’

  ‘For certain sure. I had a long talk with the Controller.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Kelda, I don’t want to heap on —’

  ‘— Just talk on. What I can’t seem to grab the first time around we can go back over.’

  ‘Kay. I’d say the Controller has a split personality —’

  ‘— Can that develop in a computer?’

  ‘Oh yes. That’s been known for some time. A lot of time, Kelda.’

  ‘Three hundred years of it.’

  ‘Plus the time they had to learn about the things until everything blew … You know chain reactions? … Like with the reactor that supplies the electricity for this place? … Basis for huge bombs. Unbelievable bombs.’

  ‘Trell, what in God’s name is a “bomb”?’

  ‘Sorry. Explosive device. For killing people with. There’s a word: Megadeath. Know what that means?’

  ‘Mega … That’s from the Greek, obviously. A million. A million … Trell, it means a million deaths!’

  ‘And that’s just the unit used for counting! Deaths to the nearest million. Had enough?’

  ‘I’m going to have to know but I … I feel … there’s something terrible happening inside my brain, Trell. It’s kind of seething, like it’s being hammered to pieces —’

  ‘Blown to bits. That’s how I feel, Kelda. Literally blown to bits!’

  ‘You said not to raise our voices.’

  ‘Right. Right! I’ll try and take this cool. There was a war. The main part of this ship was stuffed full of refugees —’

  ‘— But how could they have stood a chance? Surely, in a world that must have virtually become the inside of a reactor —’

  ‘— That’s exactly it. Right first time. The world was literally the inside of a reactor … Fission products gone berserk … Strontium-90, you name it! … Iodine-131, Cobalt-60, Caesium-137 —’

  ‘— the very substances which —’

  ‘— which run our “startime-clock”, Kelda. Some star. No one could hope to survive in it. How could they?’

  ‘How can we?’

  ‘That was the idea of the three hundred years. Radiation disperses to a sufficient extent —’

  ‘— but there’s nobody else! And this community … It’s bad enough as it is … Tortureday. that’s what the kids down here are calling it, just wait till I tell you what those filthy auto-nurses did to Sladey and his hoods … punishment is one thing! … Christ, I’ll tell you, but not now, I got to, well you know, just keep talking … the kids call it Tortureday and that’s all they are, Trell, just kids! And it’s all we are! So how do we cope? We’re just orphans in a deep-freeze, dinosaurs! —’

  ‘— The answer is we get out of here. There’s a reason and the Controller has got to face it — unless it’s gone completely mad: there’s hardly any food left, almost no fresh water. Kasiga will have to blow its top.’

  ‘And we manage out there on our own? No adults? Nothing whatever to fill the gap between the twentieth century and now? Time ran out, so they left their eggs on a derelict ship!’

  ‘But we mustn’t sink.’

  ‘That’s right, we mustn’t sink. And it won’t matter, will it, not knowing … Why they did this, why they put all that effort in preserving some world for the future, instead of keeping their own world alive and safe, how crazy could they get? If they thought we could live, why didn’t they go on living? Why not megalife instead of megadeath?’

  ‘Kelda, we’ll never understand them. How can we? All I know is, the computer is steeped in their squalid propaganda. It’s sick, like they were.’

  ‘We aren’t, though. Trell, say we’re not sick, without knowing it?’

  ‘You’re not, Kelda. No way. Therefore I can’t be either.’

  ‘But … Trell?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How do I know I exist?’

  *

  Using the experiment he had set up in the Fan Room, Eagle arrived at his own conclusions almost simultaneously with those of Trell and Kelda.

  But in an infinitely different way.

  Calling across a time/space of over three hundred years, he dialled a number on the telephone and waited.

  He did, it is true, hear voices. And undoubtedly they were shrill with panic and distress. But nobody spoke back to him.

  Instead, he had the impression that he had somehow been conveyed, via Trans-Relativity radio-telephone, into an empty room. In it could be heard the sputter of untended machinery. It echoed eerily through what sounded like a concrete chamber. It was a kind of counter — a regular beat percussively hammering on a concrete slab.

  He could hear the last of some scuttling footsteps beyond this concrete enclave.

  Then there was a sudden whirring-noise, like a ratchet clicking through some ten positions.

  Abruptly, the acoustic of the concrete room was obliterated.

  There was nothi
ng, save a steady tone in his ear. It implied that the line no longer existed. Then even that ceased.

  Eagle hung up slowly, then switched off the gear. Two large plates of metal, spaced some two feet apart, glowed, faintly luminous, in the darkness of the Fan Room. The fluorescence gradually dimmed out and there was nothing, just blackness.

  Into the darkness Eagle murmured, ‘That’s how it happened. They really did it.’

  And, for a while, he secretly cried.

  Among the victims — he knew — were his parents.

  And he knew — somehow — that in a sense they loved him.

  *

  Scorda whispered hoarsely, ‘What are you doing in my dormitory?’

  Sladey-555 jabbed him in the stomach. ‘We mustn’t ask questions, Scorda-Boy, when Sladey is doing his tour of duty. Especially when you need a bath. Why don’t people complain?’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You’ll see. Go and get Flek. I want the two of you to meet me outside the Fan Room in ten minutes. And this is top secret so keep your voice down. Only get out of those grubby pyjamas or the fan will distribute your delightful bodily scents all over the Environment. Mustn’t pollute the Environment, Scorda.’

  ‘What do you want me to wear?’

  ‘This isn’t a formal occasion so a black tie won’t be necessary. At the same time, punctuality is all.’

  At the door of the Fan Room Sladey observed Flek and Scorda distastefully. ‘Flek, the act of playing baseball seems to have stretched your arms in the most curious way. What are they made of? Chewing gum?’

  ‘There’s no need to be insulting.’

  ‘There’s every need to be insulting. You’re three parts asleep; I really don’t know what you’ve been dreaming about but you look like the Naked Ape.’

  ‘Only I ain’t naked.’

  ‘No you ain’t, thank goodness. And see here, you two. Not a word will be spoken at any time about what I’ve discovered in here. Did anyone follow you down?’

  Scorda said, ‘Why should they?’

  ‘If they were addicted to B.O. they could hardly avoid it, Scorda.’ He eased open the flange-lock of the Fan Room.

  Flek exclaimed abruptly, ‘I don’t want to go in there!’

  ‘Don’t you know who does come in here? — Don’t you know who tries to carry out highly dangerous experiments? … Take a look inside. Mustn’t run away, now. For this is where Eagle tampers with the unknown. See these two big plates? They’re electrodes of some kind. And via all this electronic gear they’re connected to the telephone.’