Through The Wormhole, Literally

by David Winship

  It was late in the afternoon when long, accusing fingers of sunlight streamed through the windows and Melinda took the stand to deliver a character reference. "Your honour," she said in a voice already choked with emotion. "I know polkingbeal67 was already loved and respected here as a war hero and I don't need to point out his achievements in that respect. Literally. I just want to tell you why he was so absolutely mythical to me too. As you may know, polkingbeal67, who I think of as just a lovable big old bear, donated his own Mortian heart to me when he saw how upset I was about not being able to return to my home planet." Actually, as we know, the whole thing had been a complete mistake, because the heart transfer had taken place when polkingbeal67, largely oblivious to Melinda's plight, had been under the impression he was to receive a new eyeball to replace the one he had lost in the battle of Hat Signs. "Anyway," Melinda continued, wiping a tear from her eye, "there simply aren't enough thankyous in the universe to express how I feel about what he did for me. Literally."

  Squirming under one of the fingers of sunlight, polkingbeal67 was beginning to feel utterly wretched.

  Melinda went on. "If you could read my energy, you'd know how close I felt to him. And still do. He was, y'know, very supportive when smolin9 and I got married." Actually, polkingbeal67 had described their relationship as a preposterous screwball abomination and he had tried everything in his power to discourage it. "So many great memories! Obviously he had a fearless and sometimes impulsive nature and this was never more apparent than when he crawled through the sewage pipes to rescue me, smolin9 and yukawa3 during the unfortunate incident at nefeshchaya. There he was brandishing his plasma rifle thing, all covered in sludge and slime and scraps of tissue. Totally erratic! He was heroic and, er, very smelly! Oh and, boy, could he do a great impression of Winston Churchill!" Recalling polkingbeal67 growling monotonously through the celebrated 'fight them on the beaches' speech, staggering around and munching on a rolled-up sou’wester, she changed her mind. "Well, no, actually he couldn't, but no one's perfect are they? Anyway, what I'm saying is that polkingbeal67 wasn't just the tough guy he liked to appear as. I know he... well, I've described him myself as being a bit like a gorilla on amphetamines and, yes, he was strong and fierce and all that, but that was all on the exterior. Most people are nice enough if you try to really see them. As for polkingbeal67 - here was someone who loved guns and had fought in many wars and yet he was the most compassionate person who ever lived. On the inside, he literally had the softest heart I've ever known. And I should know, because I've got that heart now and it's turning to mush..." She broke off to cover her face as the tears started to flow. "I'm not going to cry!" she promised, striving to smile. "He was a very special person and part of me, my heart, believes he hasn't gone away at all!" The entire courtroom choked back a sob.

  Towards the back, still singled out by one of those accusing fingers of light, polkingbeal67 had broken down and was weeping openly. "I'm sorry!" he wailed, staggering to his feet. "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! It's me, polkingbeal67! I'm here, and I've got a confession to make to you all!"

  . . .

  Melinda sat under a sprawling invercresco tree. One of the strangest plants on Morys Minor, it looked like it had been uprooted and replanted upside down, its tangled root-like branches clawing feebly at the sky. It soaked up precious moisture from methane mists and produced fruit in the form of large green husks containing inky black fluid used in the production of synthetic building materials. Beyond the tree, undulating plains, punctuated by boulders, methane swamps and clusters of habitation pods, stretched towards the horizon under a pastel pink and blue sky. As she contemplated the web-like tracery of the tree's shadow, Melinda fingered her mood ring and waited for the suns to complete their lazy descents. Grieving for smolin9, her coping mechanism consisted of wandering off alone to sit and watch the remarkable twin sunsets. She beheld a planet of conflicts and contradictions, an enigmatic world of bizarreness and serenity. It was dull but romantic, desolate and yet rich with a unique, haunting beauty. “It’s certainly not Weston-Super-Mare,” she thought, “Literally.” Having struggled to adapt to Morys Minor at first, she now held it very close to her heart. As she meditated silently, her eyes closed for a while, and when they opened again she knew she was looking at a planet that would henceforward be known as Smolin9.

  Back on her home planet, her husband's body was lying on a steel rack in a Bristol mortuary, under scrutiny by baffled intelligence agents, who had so far failed to establish any link with the sensational international news story that had gripped the world in the last few days - the staggering reappearance of NASA's Voyager 1 space probe on the south lawn of the White House. Polkingbeal67's inspired notion of teleporting the probe to the very doorstep of the President of the United States had had exactly the desired effect - the bumbling, insular earthlings, without being subjected to any kind of scary ordeal, now knew, beyond any possibility of doubt, that they were part of a wider intergalactic community. This was hailed by the ICJAC (and many other intergalactic bodies and organisations) as a watershed moment for broader humanity. Furthermore, there could be no doubt where the credit for the masterly exploit belonged, for, attached to the outside of the probe, in place of the golden record, was one of yukawa3's golden yellow sou’westers.

  No one could blame the police for missing the connection between the return of Voyager 1 and the discovery of the mysteriously mutated body of a waitress found in a guest house in south west England. Certainly, no one could blame them for failing to realise that the strange device they had confiscated and stored in a top-secret vault was a Mortian biomimetic mutator. What is strange, however, is that the Mortians themselves did not realise the mutator contained a viable transferable copy of smolin9's Karma 5.

  THE ANSWER IS … A PENGUIN

  The air was tranquil. As yukawa3 arrived at the medical pod, a procession of meagre grey and yellow clouds were drifting slowly and solemnly across the sky like sacrificial smoke in an old watercolour painting. The sound of a space cruiser manoeuvring overhead triggered a sudden flash of deja vu that left him staring blankly into space for a moment.

  Since the trial, he had experienced such episodes quite frequently. It was as if reality was fusing in some way with a dream or a memory and he would feel slightly nauseous and disoriented. Actually, if anyone were to press him to describe the queasiness, which they did not, he would have said it was more a sickness of the heart than the stomach. Apparently, no such elucidation was required - according to the senior medibot, these were simply petit mal seizures consistent with epilepsy. Although Mortians generally enjoyed long, healthy, disease-free lives, hippocampal glitches were as common as intermittent crashes and freezes on an earthling computer. And just like an earthling computer, the solution was invariably a quick-fix reboot. The neurological circuitry of the Mortian hippocampus could effectively be ‘reset’ by means of a quick zap from a medibot's molecoil pen.

  The senior medibot, similar in appearance to a Mortian humanoid but lacking in facial expressions and a little random in eye and lip movements, swivelled around to face yukawa3 and spoke to him in a steady, nearly monotonous voice: "You've come for your reset?"

  Yukawa3 sat tentatively on the edge of the examination table. "Well, yes," he said, "The problem is this deja vu thing I keep getting."

  "That's right. You told me yesterday," said the medibot in a pinched, quavering tone that culminated in a suppressed chortle, suggesting that the joke had been intentional.

  Yukawa3, who really should have seen that coming, wondered aloud who had been responsible for the absurd notion of configuring androids with a sense of humour. With a frown of irritation, he went on. "It's like... Something sets it off and I feel all kind of fuzzy, then I get this really strange, scary feeling and my chest feels tight and my body feels sort of feeble. Sometimes it's intense and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's frequent. Sometimes it's not. I think the answer is..." The senior medibot cocked his head in sceptical curios
ity, waiting for yukawa3 to continue. "And I think what the answer is..." the cadet prattled on. "No, okay, I don't know what the answer is. I thought it would come to me while I was talking but it didn't. So, anyway..." At this point, the molecoil discharged its energy and yukawa3 was rendered momentarily speechless and senseless, his eyes wide open but no one at home (in truth, his expression barely changed at all, making it difficult for the medibot to recognise the moment when his patient's brain returned to normal functionality).

  Periodically, the medibot's voice droned, "Is your brain functioning? Can you hear me yet?"

  After a few minutes of dumb stares, yukawa3's voice suddenly let rip, "No! It's not working! What's happened? I don't think I'm going to make it! Do something!"

  Recognising yukawa3's preposterous panic attack as a return to normal behaviour, the medibot replied in a pinched, quavering tone that culminated in a suppressed chortle, "Don't worry, I can assure you that as long as you're a patient here, the last thing you're going to do is die."

  As he left the medical pod and crossed the cruiser park towards the avenue of trees marking the border between the civic area and the thinly scattered dwelling pods, yukawa3 felt himself sinking into melancholy. He saw sadness in everything. Whether it was the sombre hue of the sky or the drooping fruit of the inverted invercresco trees or the grimy, sparse arrangement of the residential precinct, everything seemed to reinforce the persistent echoes of smolin9's death that had plagued him ever since his return to Morys Minor (now known as ‘Smolin9’). Gazing forlornly at the sky, he felt irresistibly drawn to smolin9's final resting place on Earth, so much so that while he was making up his mind to return there at the first opportunity, he failed to notice the mother of all methane rainstorms approaching from the west and got thoroughly drenched.

  It was not a good time to be without one of his cherished yellow sou’westers, but he was going to have to get used to that. At the Niffis massacre trial, the President of the Intergalactic Court of Justice, Arbitration and Conciliation had acquitted yukawa3 with the proviso that the ruling should not be taken as a precedent, that the accused should continue to initiate judicious contact with alien species such as earthlings and that he should make a personal sacrifice as a symbolic gesture of atonement. Yukawa3 had been delighted with the verdict until he learned that the sacrifice would entail the loss of his collection of earthling sou’westers. As he arrived at his dwelling pod, soaking wet and shivering, he was greeted by three court officials specially appointed to supervise the sou’wester disposal. One of these, a gangling saurian from Permia, sputtered and gargled like a cat coughing up a fur ball. Yukawa3 stared blankly and then realised he had been asked something.

  "Are you ready?" the saurian repeated. The words seemed to linger in the air as yukawa3 attempted to discern some shred of meaning in them.

  "Are you the pest control people?" yukawa3 enquired. He had recently noticed damage to insulation in the walls and ceilings of his pod and suspected an infestation of pod rats. Having referred the matter to his domain conclave, he had been expecting a visit from the exterminators.

  "Can we go in and get your hats?" asked the saurian.

  By now, yukawa3 was making some sense of the garbled noise issuing from the saurian's mouth and concluded that he had asked about the rats. "Yeh," he said, making a sweeping gesture of his arm. "Go ahead. Feel free. Search everywhere and find as many as you can."

  The rain had stopped and yukawa3 waited outside while his pod was turned upside down and every corner scrutinised. A short while later, the three officials reappeared, their arms laden with yellow sou’westers, including the ones yukawa3 had concealed so ingeniously in various nooks and crannies. A look of utter dismay and consternation flashed across his features and his face dropped like a sack of potatoes. Noticing this, the saurian gurgled, "It must be done. This is your symbolic sacrifice."

  As the officials started to incinerate the hats and an acrid smell forced them to retreat, yukawa3 hopped around in agitation. "Wait!" he wailed. "Why don't we use symbolic hats?"

  The incident only served to intensify yukawa3's desire to return to Earth. It represented the opportunity of a transformative experience through which he might be able to lose himself for a while and become immersed in an alternative life. As the primary sunset cast its pale purple glow onto the wall beside him, he sat with his microwocky and began the process of devising a new earthling identity using the computer's interactive voice response technology. "I've got a question for you," he announced.

  The microwocky purred slightly and replied, "What is the question?"

  The standard phase one microwocky was a product of advanced Mortian microplasma and nanomanufacturing technology, striking not only for its bewildering shape-shifting appearance but also for its ability to facilitate holographic telepresence. It provided real-time translations of nearly all languages and dialects, the one known exception being the strange phraseology adopted by chilloks (a myrmecam was required to communicate with this species). Boasting a myriad of sophisticated tools and applications such as insect zapping, muting all sound within a specific radius and calculating the time to your next bowel movement, the microwocky could even be configured to act as a tunnel node for the purpose of wormhole communication and travel. Users could swipe, rub, prod, poke, flick and push the surface of the device to initiate the desired functions.

  According to the developers, the latest beta version could emulate the brains of other Mortian (and some non-Mortian) organisms, but pre-sales had plummeted amid mounting rumours that the new functionality did not work and was actually nothing more than a scam. According to some reports, the developers could only get the software to compile by rendering every line of code inactive. On one occasion, they tried to get a microwocky to emulate an earthling dog - everything went well until it detected incoming mail, whereupon it leaped at the developer and fastened itself to his leg.

  Nevertheless, the standard phase one was an indispensable piece of Mortian time-travelling kit. Having been programmed with both rational and simulated emotional responses, it appeared to exhibit an uncanny level of true artificial intelligence - it complained when it got lonely, enjoyed conversations and loved to share jokes.

  Sophisticated as they assuredly were, microwockys were not universally appreciated by their owners. On one particular visit to Earth, for example, yukawa3's mentor, polkingbeal67, had stood on a mountain gazing at a dark cloud in the distance and the conversation between him and his 'wocky went something like this:

  polkingbeal67: How far away is that storm?

  microwocky: Which storm?

  polkingbeal67: The huge one there in the distance.

  microwocky: Oh, that one.

  polkingbeal67: Well? How far can we see?

  microwocky: 150 million earthling kilometres.

  Convinced that the device was malfunctioning, polkingbeal67 tossed it from the mountain, quite unaware that the hapless contraption had correctly calculated the distance from the mountain to the sun, where a solar storm had indeed been raging furiously.

  Yukawa3's microwocky purred again and repeated, "What is the question?"

  "I'm going to apply for a new assignment on the Pale Blue Dot," said yukawa3. "How should I present myself on the planet?"

  The microwocky prompted him for the mission parameters. Yukawa3 scratched his head and thought long and hard about this. The way he was feeling about life at that moment, he was likely to be away for some time, so he wanted to be sure the mission was one he would be really comfortable with. "Okay, let me see," he mumbled. "I don't want anything complex. Let's keep it simple."

  "The word 'simple' requires clarification," the microwocky intoned in its flat staccato voice. "Do you mean half-witted? Moronic?"

  Yukawa3 shook his head. "No, no! Well, kind of. I mean simple as in uncomplicated. Black and white." He tried as hard as he could to stipulate more parameters, but his nasty experience with the City of Niffis meant he became a bit fixated w
ith the means of travel. He wanted to be transported by wormhole because he still felt nervous about another crack at conventional space travel. "So, yeh, simple, black and white," he went on. "It should involve no flying. Got that? No flying!" Before pressing the GO button in confirmation, he suddenly remembered his favourite earthling activity and added, "Plenty of fishing! I want to catch fish!"

  "Mission parameters complete," droned the microwocky. "Processing your question..."

  Yukawa3 fretted impatiently. "Yes?" he blurted out. "Well? What's the answer?"

  The microwocky purred. "The answer is..." It paused for a moment as if a trace of self-doubt had flickered across its mysterious circuitry. "The answer is a penguin."

  . . .

  If yukawa3 was finding it difficult to adjust to the post-Niffis, post-smolin9, post-trial dynamic, it was like nothing compared to the meltdown suffered by his mentor, polkingbeal67, following his dramatic and humiliating courtroom confession. The former Mortian war hero had not suffered such an indignity since the early days of the Jatron wars.

  That was back in the heady days of intergalactic imperialism, before the evolution of the neoliberal cosmic philosophy advocated and championed by the current Mortian premier. Before he lost it in the battle of Hat Signs, polkingbeal67 had had his eye firmly set on military glory and conquest. However, while leading guerrilla troops in battles against General Vog's invading Trox army at Ybesan, he had not been averse to a little sport when the opportunity arose. And it arose one day at the beginning of the orbis bird shooting season when his regiment had been withdrawn to a reserve position where wounds were licked and lessons learned for the future following a long and bloody assault on an enemy stronghold. In those days, the beakless orbis bird had been one of the most ubiquitous species on the planet and its habit of plunging down onto a dwelling pod and rolling down the roof so that its feathers could absorb vital nutrients had driven Mortians to distraction. Given that the orbis bird population densities often reached nuisance levels, shooting them had been considered both expedient and necessary. In fact, if the leader had not insisted on protecting the birds during the nesting season, the hunting would have continued all year round.