The 2084 Precept

by Anthony D. Thompson

  My brain stopped. My neurons went on strike. They were not accustomed to improbable and irrational occurrences of this magnitude. The synapses, which are the coordinates of the nervous impulses passing from the axon of one neuron to the dendrites of another, were in disarray. Synapses, after all, were designed and created to function exclusively under pre-determined and mathematically defined conditions. Nevertheless, interruptions to the ordered activities of the central nervous system do not—except in situations of, for example, extreme torture—last for any protracted length of time. The recovery occurs within seconds, even micro-seconds, as the metaphysical need to reassert itself takes over again and the frantic search for an explanation complying with the imperatives of unconditional logic is launched.

  And of course the logic was found. In this case it was already embedded in the appropriate compartment of the brain. This was a natural event, said the logic. There was nothing unnatural or supernatural about it in any shape or form. Such events had occurred before and they would inexorably continue to occur in the future. Among others, the renowned Shoemaker-Levy comet had died its appointed death on Jupiter less than ten years ago. And Jeremy Parker had merely had prior knowledge of the timing of this particular object's demise, even if our scientists on this occasion hadn't. And that was all there was to it, that was the logic.

  I continued to watch for a while and before long the news commentator began to relay to us the few snippets of the information he had been fed, the size of the asteroid was unusually big, the causes and the peculiarities of its orbital exit were still being researched, and so on and so forth.

  I switched off the television. Sometimes life's ocean waves lift you up high on a gentle swell and deposit you tenderly onto a soft and sandy shore with, for example, a beach bar not far away. There would be no embarrassment for me, there would be no hassle—at least not of the unpleasant kind—and I would not have to catch a flight tonight or make an appearance at New Scotland Yard tomorrow morning. And—the beach bar was also stocked with diverse bottles of very old single malt whiskey—my chances of earning the extra outstanding €300,000 had multiplied exponentially.

  Back to earth. My mobile rang. It was Sr. Pujol from Barcelona. He was just calling me on the off-chance in order to enquire whether there was any possibility of our meeting at his group's offices in Barcelona at the end of this week; that would then allow me to start at the shipping company in Palma first thing on Monday morning. Cheeky to say the least, putting pressure on your new consultant before he has even started.

  But my mood was a good one and after some quick thinking, I said that I could agree provisionally. A great sacrifice, a major reorganization of my work and travel schedule, issues with my current project, but O.K., provided he appreciated this might result in my having to fly a couple of times to the U.K. for a day or two during the next few weeks. He was happy to agree to that, plus he owes me one. Or he thinks he does. My thinking told me to tell him that I could make it for Friday around 1 p.m. That way I could drive overnight on Thursday from Okriftel to Barcelona, meet Pujol, and then take the night ferry to Palma on the Friday. No need for a hotel in Barcelona, I still preferred to keep Delsey and his crew off my back for as long as possible.

  I knew I could probably arrange the pending interviews with Jeremy for a Saturday or a Sunday, but it was good to have agreed alternatives with Sr. Pujol just in case Jeremy were to require some unforeseen and sudden assistance.

  "Brownie," I called. There were the usual thumps and skidding noises as he got to his feet, his mat went sliding across the floor, and downstairs we went to see Monika. She had already been out for a walk, cleared last night's cobwebs. But the day was still warm and she was happy to take another one. We walked down to the river and along it for a while and then we decided that an early meal would be a good idea.

  We returned to Marie-Anne's and ordered fish and white wine again ('you two again’, smiled Marie-Anne), and Mr. Brown joined in a football game with some kids who were playing on the grass nearby. I broached the subject of the car. I told her that I would not be taking my Audi to Spain, that all of the cars get scraped and scratched in that country—an exaggeration but not much of one—and that I would be hiring one for the trip and would be leaving on Thursday evening. I didn't get the chance to ask her if she would agree to the hire in her name because her eyes gleamed, she said why hire one, let me use yours and you can take mine, it's scratched enough already. And that was the deal. Her car was a white Golf with one of the bigger engines, probably four or five years old, and it would serve its purpose well in getting me to Barcelona. There are speed limits anyway on the French autoroutes and the Spanish autopistas. And following that it would remain permanently parked for a while, not that Monika needed to know that.

  After the meal we had a coffee and she told me that I shouldn't have invited her to such an expensive dinner and that I shouldn't have given her such an outrageously expensive gift and that she had had a wonderful birthday. She also thanked me for putting her to bed but told me I should have undressed her, women prefer that and so do their clothes. And she looked at me with her big brown eyes and a wistful smile on her lips. She said that it was a very sad thing that my work took me away from home all the time.

  And as we got up to leave, she didn't take my hand, but she put her arm through mine, and Mr. Brown sniffed his way along in front of us and led us both back home.

  DAY 26

  Today I decided to do nothing except play chess on the computer and read my book. According to one of the Bible's authors, God also took a day of rest. Although opinions to be found here and there allege that it might have been better had he decided not to.

  I also decided to call Jeremy, pressed the green button on his phone.

  "Good morning, Peter," he said and I could imagine him sitting in his office in his expensive business suit and wearing one of his expensive collection of ties.

  "Good morning, Jeremy. I just thought that I would check to see if everything is O.K. for tomorrow's meeting."

  "No problems from my end, Peter. After all, all I have to do is appear at the appointed time and that I shall do."

  "Fine. Then I assume you have no objections to my starting my Spain project? I intend to travel there on the day after tomorrow for a kick-off meeting the next day."

  "Objections? None at all, Peter. And if I understood you correctly, you will be able to fly over on mutually agreed dates for the remaining interviews. That is still the case?"

  "Absolutely, Jeremy. An agreement is an agreement, at least between one honorable person and another. I wouldn't apply that to most of the elected birdbrains or to the likes of Hitler, of course."

  He laughed. "Oh, you have no need to convince me of your non-birdbrain status, Peter, and you are not the Hitler type. And in any case I assume that the small matter of a monetary nature continues to play its minor role."

  "I don't mind telling you that that is not very polite of you, Jeremy. For your information, that small matter, as you put it, is smaller for you than it is for me and the role it plays is a major one. But that is not the reason for my keeping to our agreement; I am complying with our agreement because I always comply with my agreements."

  "Indeed. I apologize. That was very impolite of me, Peter. And I am benefitting at least as much from our relationship as you are. Please accept my apologies. My sincere apologies."

  "Apologies accepted, Jeremy, thank you. Now tell me, how did you know about the asteroid?"

  "Know about the asteroid?"

  "Yes, how did you know it was due to hit Jupiter yesterday?"

  "Peter," he said, "It was not due to hit Jupiter yesterday. That is why your astronomers didn't know anything about it. I actually made it happen, or rather I asked my colleagues to agree to do it for me. They are more conversant with the technical requirements and the mathematical calculations than I am."

  "You and your people caused it to happen? I thought you said that you can't influe
nce physical objects, you can't make things move. You said that you can only influence people's minds by hacking into their cerebral function, by manipulating electrical impulses and neuron activity and the like."

  "Ah, and that is so," said Jeremy. "We would not be able to physically move an asteroid or any other solid object, or semi-solid come to that. But what we are able to do, we are able to influence the six fundamental interactions of nature. At this point in time your species is only aware of four of them, namely: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. The first two are the ones which are of interest to us here. Gravity is a natural phenomenon in which most physical bodies are attracted to each other by a force proportional to their masses. Note that I say masses, not size. And gravity is responsible for many things. It causes dispersed matter to coalesce and to remain coalesced and it is responsible for most of the macroscopic objects in the universe—including your own planet and your sun. Gravity is also responsible for the intensely high temperatures in the interiors of forming planets and stars. Gravity is also the cause of 'weight'. Without gravity, weight would simply not exist."

  "And you can influence gravity?" I asked.

  "No, no, we can't do that, but we can influence the gravitational forces affecting an object."

  "How?"

  "Well, first of all, you would need to understand that gravity itself is not, precisely defined, a force."

  "It isn't?"

  "No, and your modern physicists already know that. They accept the findings of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which states that gravitation is a consequence of the curvature of space-time, which causes and governs the motion of inertial objects. In other words, it is not a force. And it is something that we can influence."

  "I still have my question. How?"

  "Well, there is also a second ingredient involved. Electromagnetism."

  "What is electromagnetism?"

  "Well, Peter, let me see…you presumably know what a magnet is?"

  "I think so."

  "It is a metal producing an invisible magnetic field which strongly attracts other ferromagnetic materials. Actually, it attracts all substances, but its pull on non-ferromagnetic objects is very weak, hardly noticeable. And its 'unlike' poles are the ones which attract, while its 'like' poles do the opposite, they repel. Now… an electromagnet is like a magnet, except that its magnetic force is generated by electricity. In other words, if the electric current stops, it stops being a magnet."

  "And?"

  "And so magnetic fields are produced by the motion of electrically charged particles and we are able to directly influence the forces which result from that motion. We can influence the activity of those electrically charged particles."

  "So you can use your hacking skills to mess around with non-solid forces and/or space-time, and in that way you can affect any solid objects which happen to find themselves under the control of such forces?"

  "Yes, and I can't explain it any further than that because not even your physicists would comprehend it. Even their decades-long research into anti-gravitational forces hasn't increased their understanding very much."

  "But you still haven't answered my question, Jeremy, so let me put it to you in a different way. Why do the four—or six—natural phenomena of nature exist in the first place?"

  "Ah, now that is a good question, Peter. And the answer is…we don't know. Like you, we merely happen to know that they exist."

  "Now that is interesting, so there are some matters you don't know about. And if you don't mind my saying so, Jeremy, that is a good and calming thing for me to hear."

  And it was a good and calming thing for me to hear. It was somehow of comfort to me to know that he hadn't taken care of every single detail in that intricate fantasy world of his. And his attempt to explain how that asteroid was moved was therefore vague and incomplete and therefore not to be trusted. Although…the matter of the asteroid still had me puzzled. How could he possibly have known about it?

  "In that case," I continued, "I obviously won't be getting an answer to my question. So please tell me about the asteroid itself."

  "There's not much to tell, Peter. There are millions of asteroids in your solar system and most of them exist within two areas. One of these areas is between Mars and Jupiter, and the other one stretches beyond the orbit of Neptune in what you call the Kuiper belt. The asteroids come in all sizes. The largest one, which you call Ceres, has a diameter of about 1,000 kilometers. Actually, you reclassified that object as a dwarf planet some eight years ago. Next you have 2 Pallas at 544 kilometers diameter and 4 Vesta at 525 kilometers, although the latter has more mass than 2 Pallas. And the minor ones can be as small as a couple of millimeters. In fact, an average 90 tons of these objects descends upon your planet every day."

  This called for an interruption. "Did you say 90 tons every day?" I queried.

  "Yes, Peter. You are bombarded every day by millions of meteors, meteoroids, and meteorites—the latter being your term for objects which actually impact your atmosphere or surface. But as their size is usually anything from that of a grain of sand to the size of a fist, and as they are travelling quite fast (40,000 kilometers per hour would be a common speed), nearly everything vaporizes as it enters your atmosphere. My colleagues simply chose an asteroid which was large enough to make its impact on Jupiter an interesting one for you."

  "And what if they had sent it to Earth instead of to Jupiter?" I asked. "Would it have destroyed our planet?"

  "Oh no, your planet is too big for an asteroid impact to be able to destroy it. But a large enough asteroid would certainly destroy all life on your planet, if that's what you mean, except—perhaps—for some bacteria. In fact, this has already happened twice in your planet's history, mass extinctions both times. And it will probably happen again, but perhaps not for a very long time. You will, however, continue to have more near-misses like the one that passed very close to you a few years ago."

  "Well…you've explained to me how you got that asteroid to leave its orbit, not that I really understand your explanation, but I'll take your word for it. However, how did you manage to get it to travel as far as Jupiter in such a short time? It was a very sudden event, virtually without notice in fact."

  "Now that was done by utilizing our space-time technology, a science which you might describe, in its simplest form, as a far-reaching extrapolation of your Einstein theories, and for which you would need several years of study to be able to understand, Peter. Assuming, that is, that you were an accomplished physicist in the first place."

  "O.K., Jeremy, understood. Accepted. And anyway, many thanks for making the effort to explain. I appreciate it. I guess I just have to accept the fact that the event happened, and that it happened exactly as you said it would happen, and exactly when you said it would happen. That is the fact of the matter. So thanks again for the info, and may I wish you a successful meeting tomorrow."

  "Oh, successful or otherwise, Peter, it will be intriguing. A close-up view of how your species reacts to something beyond its comprehension. I know you don't believe me, Peter, and they probably won't either. But they, like you, cannot reject facts and it will be interesting to see what they decide. I'll update you on the particulars in due course."

  And we said our goodbyes. He was right, I didn't believe him. He hadn't convinced me. He hadn't convinced me at all. His explanations had been far too amateurish, based on an absolute minimum of knowledge, they were far too nebulous, they didn't hold water. In fact, thinking over his rhetoric even more closely, he had not provided me with any intelligible explanation at all.

  So there remained the one and only possible conclusion. He must have known about it in advance but didn't want to admit it. He preferred to maintain his carefully and painstakingly fabricated delusion of the alien traveler. But—honest as I am—the one and only possible conclusion was also a difficult one for me to swallow. I was confused and I had, for the first time since I had been involved with him, some
doubts concerning his status as a human being. But please don't ask me what the form or consistency of those doubts were, because I don't know.

  And so I took Mr. Brown for a walk, I played some chess on my laptop and studied some end-game situations, and I took Mr. Brown for another walk and I ate at the Italian.

  I also stayed up reading a large portion of my new book, 'L'Élégance du hérisson' by Muriel Barbery—an extraordinarily beautiful book because of its writing, and also because of that rare manifestation in literature, its uniqueness. Not a great book but an eminent one. I must buy a couple of copies of the English translation to use as gifts for a blinking red light or two (would they have kept the title, 'The Elegance of the Hedgehog'?), and to see if they have been able to achieve the herculean task of retaining most or all of its literary accomplishment. And then I went to bed.

  DAY 27

  I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmic primordial globule. Oh yes.

  To a prokaryote to be precise. Prokaryotes such as bacteria and archaea first appeared on this particular planet about 4 billion years ago. Like all living cells, they use the same basic set of nucleotides and amino acids, and they share a limited set of morphologies. I use the present tense here, because some of these organisms are still around.

  Around 2 billion years ago, enkaryotic cells arrived on the scene (don't ask me how, maybe God or Allah sent them do you think?) and eventually caused the next major change in cell structure by engulfing bacteria, by means of endosymbiosis, and triggering a co-evolution which finally resulted in organisms such as mitochondria, hydrogenosomes and, in plants and algae, chloroplasts.

  But these were still unicellular organisms. The first multicellular organisms began to appear in the planet's oceans around 600 million years ago, in the form of sponges, slime moulds and a variety of similar organisms. And not too long after that, something we call the Cambrian Explosion produced a massive increase in biological diversity, probably caused by the significant increase at that time in photosynthetic activity, the consequence of which was an accumulation of oxygen in our planet's atmosphere.