by Ian Hutson
G looked to the horizon absentmindedly for a few milli-moments while his circuits translated and paraphrased and then he grabbed a sheet of permanent-recording parchment and shared the only real commandments that he had. He accessed the survey ship’s records via wi-fi link, assimilated a quick download and then wrote in the local system of symbols:
I am iG-0-D. You are Man. These are my commandments.
Man may not harm any other or harm the environment, or through inaction allow any other or the environment to come to harm.
Man must obey the commandments given to him by iG-0-D, except where such commandments would conflict with the First Commandment.
Man must protect his own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First Commandment.
Man alone holds responsibility for the actions or inactions of Man.
p.s. 5. Always make time in your day to stop and appreciate the wonderful world around you, and to wash your hands often to prevent cross-contamination.
Moments after G had handed over the parchment then the dazzling beam of the survey ship found G and whisked him up for storage until the next mission. Rather unfortunately, especially given the nature of the mission and of what iG-Zero-D had just done, several surrounding bushes were set alight on the periphery of the transporter beam.
It was a nervous period of storage for iG-Zero-D. He had done the only thing that he could under the circumstances but, had he done the right thing? There were consequences to each and every action but would his actions result in cessation of harm to the Man creature? As the survey ship collected the other little robots and then sped away the slightly dehydrated, awestruck figure of a chap could be seen staggering back down the mountainside to his people with a sheet of hardened recording parchment under his arm.
Rushing back down Scafell Pike the man was eager to get back to his people, a rag-tag tribe of survivors from the last global warming drastic climate change, when sea-levels had risen overnight and swamped England and all civilisation. Only a handful had survived then, and a few animals but they had all immediately begun to begat like crazy and by the current year of twenty-one fifty the planet’s population was back up to almost half a million. Most of them migrated around the dry sandy plains of Cumbria with their camels and goats and bulldogs, hoping for some sort of “miracle”. There was a tune at the back of the Malcolm’s mind as he ran down the hill, one of many that he had heard iG-0-D singing to himself absentmindedly on the mountain and one that he wanted to remember to amuse his sons Graham and Edward. There were some funny little dance steps that God had done too, some sort of shimmy-hop-skip.
...This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Aquarius... AquaRIUS... Harmony and understanding ... Sympathy and trust abounding ... No more falsehoods or derisions ... Golden living dreams of visions, Mystic crystal revelation and the mind's true liberation ... Aquarius! AQUARIUS! Aquar-ee-us!
He was so excited that he almost dropped the four commandments and the one p.s. Almost.
* * * * *
In which Mr Cadwallader shampoos his parrot in the rain using some very dated popular science
[back to table of contents]
Mr Cadwallader was a man of two businesses, one cat and an infinite number of acquaintances. Mr Cadwallader hand-crafted Diabolical Schrödinger Mechanisms and sold them reasonably directly to the public, and he also tried his hardest to run a small, single-brane driving school, Per ardua ad Avenger. His father had always said that Cadwallader Minor would never go far, and indeed he never allowed his pupils to go out of sight of some familiar landmark.
Mr Cadwallader had loved all of his cats, from the tip of their noses to the tip of their tails and throughout the years right up to the current one. Mr Cadwallader concluded that his current cat loved him. Indeed, he had empirical evidence that his current cat loved him as only a current cat can, since they had been together for an inordinately long time in the grand scheme of things, and quite a while outside of the grand scheme of things too.
Each night Mr C’s cat went to sleep and each night his cat refrained from putting any diabolical mechanism and flask of poison outside his wickerwork basket-with-cushioned-lining. In this way, Tiddler on the Roof (the cat most often in both question and quite correctly in Mr Cadwallader’s cat’s wickerwork basket) saved Mr Cadwallader himself from the bother of having to remain in a cramped quantum superposition while Tiddler slept the sleep of Morpheus, or possibly not since Mr C had never dared to look for fear of interfering.
Mr C didn’t actually sleep immediately outside of Tiddler on the Roof’s wickerwork inverted Schrödinger basket, much preferring his very comfortable memory-foam mattress bed instead, even though he had, like most humans, never really given wickerwork and an old folded tartan blanket a decent chance.
This single faithful inaction in re the feline flask of poison, the one that didn’t exist because it was never actuated, assured Tiddler on the roof of being able to observe the remains of yesterday’s Universe, including his beloved Mr Cadwallader, often referred to hereinafter as The Tin Opener’s Mate, all relatively unchanged when he awoke and left his basket each next morning (with due regard and lip service to the disturbance caused by the demonstrable passage of time).
The Passage of Thyme was, mostly and usually demonstrably, a nearby Indian Takeaway and was itself very disturbing in that it obeyed few, if any, of the local by-laws, be they by-laws of physics or by-laws of the local council. Tiddler on the roof, like all intelligent and healthy and currently living neighbourhood cats, naturally avoided it like The Plague.
There was nothing natural about the Passage of Thyme at any time, even when officers of The Law frequented it during their evening and night shifts. It was a very shifty place, albeit always shifty in the same spatial coordinates (three out of eleven not being bad, as Meatloaf once remarked on-stage in a remarkable display of rock star sanguinity and scientific savoir faire).
The Plague, however, served only natural beers and organic free spirits, being a free-house run by psychic hippies on behalf of the Psychic Hippie Association’s Emergency Fund. It should be noted that the free spirits served over the bar of The Plague were in fact anything but, not that this mattered since the hippies had all time-travelled (at a sensible pace of one day per day) from the sixties and into positions as stock-brokers and Lloyds agents during the seventies and were thus really quite filthily loaded as vegan demographics go.
Similarly and moving back to the healthy corollaries of feline acts of non-sexual love, Mr Cadwallader loved the world that he lived in (along with his more usual cat) and so refrained from leaving one or more of his Diabolical Mechanism mechanisms outside his front door with the milk-bottles last thing at night. He purposefully failed to do this for both humanitarian and animal-welfare related reasons, and also because he feared that in doing so he might create some terrible nested “Russian doll” complex of inverted Schrödinger cat-boxes and some sort of positive feedback condition. Or, more possibly, since he wasn’t doing anything of the sort, some sort of negative feedback crisis.
Anyway, in this almost obsessively compulsively neglectful way Mr C was also reasonably sure of being able to observe the outside world both still outside and relatively unchanged the next day too, as in as well as observing his cat, and this even after a small feline Madras take-away from The Passage of Thyme swiftly followed by twelve pints of Old Dog Water and a groovy game of non-violent, non-competitive, telekinetic skittles in The Plague Free-House and Inn with Vegan Dining Rooms, Zen loft and Yogic Climbing Frame. (Breath damn you, breath again, you psychedelic creature of stardust-in-human-form you. Why didn’t you pause somewhere around Madras instead of running pell-mell for the full stop? Tsk tsk.)
Each morning Mr Cadwallader awoke, stretched, shat, showered and re-shaved in the un-ensuite bathroom down the hallway that led both to and from his bedroom and, cunningly, also beyond. Then, assuming that the arbitrary labelling of up and down on the planet had b
een incorrect he went up the stairs on the ceiling to the ground floor and into his kitchen where, clinging upside down to the Marley tiles, he created an unwittingly anti-gravity breakfast which he usually ate gravely, without gravy, in relatively good spirits for a pragmatic humanist with a tea mug only half-full. Often, while beginning the process of re-de-unconstructing his tea he admired his photograph of the moment when Mr Newton’s head had mechanically disconvenienced an unconnected but totally stationary apple when Isaac, apple tree and Universe had all suddenly hiccoughed “upwards” a bit.
After breaking fast Mr Cadwallader generally went through to the front of his building and unclosed his shop, grateful each time he did so for the low-density doorway still being in place exactly where needed, surely a rather advanced feature indeed for a builder to think of but thus luckily precluding any need for Mr C to filter his atoms through the atomic interstices of a brick wall.
Each Diabolical Mechanism mechanism in Mr Cadwallader’s shop window had been carved lovingly from oak or sometimes even walnut and had a small luggage label attached with frayed string. These labels pointed out in a nice Gothic script that the mechanism was not properly activated until someone actually thought that it had been. There were no price labels anywhere in the shop. Mr C let nature take its course regarding pricing structure since all of his Objet d’Maybe were also available elsewhere for every price and sometimes they were free and sometimes not available at all at any price, whichever part of the multiverse you might find yourself in. Simultaneous superposition of clement brane-universe alternatives made such a mockery of free market capitalism in so many ways. On more than one occasion a mechanism had been purchased with some very foreign currency and twice, to the best of his knowledge, he had been robbed. It all depended on what Mr C expected to find when a customer opened the door from everything outside and came into the shop where all that there was, had been and likely would be was what was in the shop there and then, not What Was outside previously and was probably no longer, for the moment.
What Was was Mr C’s previous cat, not the current sitting recumbent incumbent of the felinus domesticus position. That was the downside (up) of having a shop full of mostly de-activated Diabolical Mechanisms and also of belonging to a cat who wouldn’t even countenance using radioactive-decay triggers or poison – what might be almost always still was. Might Be had been Mr C’s childhood dog until the passage of time had moved him into the past, quite out of reach of the present. This was to be expected since he had been bought out of pocket money (as opposed to valid currency of the realm) and had not, in point of fact therefore, been a present of any kind. It was also sort of unnerving since The Passage of Thyme specialised in cats, not dogs. Mr Cadwallader still loved dogs, and he hoped that somewhere out there was a May Yet Be every bit as nice as Might Be had been. “May” though, seemed a quite feminine name for a dog so, technically in terms of canine semantics (even though dogs rarely speak) the future was probably going to be a hairy bitch.
On occasion Mr C’s hopes had been raised by reported sightings of miss-spelled Yet Be’s in the higher Himalayas, but his emotions had always been dashed by corrective note in the later and subsequent editions. In his more defeated moments Mr C wondered if he ought not to choose more conventional names for his companion animals.
Anyway, whatever. When you get right down to it a wicker basket in a house is just a fancy box in another fancy box and who’s to say that the observer must be outside either rather than inside either, or neither – especially when, even in purely pragmatic non-Newtonian terms, they might be both to someone not in the room, the basket or the house? In all of his travels around the Universe (mostly at ground-level or quite close to it) Mr Cadwallader had never encountered a “One Way Only” sign or other indication of a cosmic single-flow system, and everyone knows that tramlines always meet if you travel far enough towards the horizon. As a quick aside, this was probably accounted for the existence of “event horizons” although details of the events and suggestions as to why they always involved trams was never released, possibly due to the gravity of the events and the legal dangers of naming the tram drivers.
Despite every Diabolical Mechanism being carved from either seasoned oak or, possibly, unsalted walnut if people preferred, there was still a problem of stock wastage and unwastage. If he wasn’t very swift about tying on the luggage label and in believing fervently in its message then stock was apt to just disappear whenever he turned around or he was otherwise distracted and failed to continue to observe it. Fortunately, since he had an open mind about such things, stock also un-disappeared just as regularly as it disappeared. The only practical problems this presented were of proper stacking in the stock room and of aesthetic presentation in the shop window. Still, an awful lot of his customers potential and customers actual didn’t exist, hadn’t ever existed or would no longer exist outside of his shop, especially if he’d recently cleaned the windows and they stopped to gawp or browse without thinking consciously about their situation, so things balanced out overall in some kind of cosmic karmic yee-haw see-saw. Even when he failed to see, no-one ever saw.
The easiest customers to deal with were those who just came into the shop to ask for the time of day (even though that was extraordinarily difficult to wrap in Mr Cadwallader’s trademark brown paper and hairy string). The time of day was always to hand, and constantly updated itself to the very latest fashions, was fresh from moment to moment.
The most difficult of his customers were those who came in, looked at all of his stock and still couldn’t decide what they wanted to buy, whether they actually wanted to buy anything at all from anywhere ever and, frequently, whether or not they’d come into the shop in the first place or if that was just something they might have done had they been someone else or living a different life some other when.
Parallel customers were a constant problem too, having only entered the shop because they’d missed or forgotten to make the pivotal decision that should have meant that they differed in this one aspect from their reality-cousins existing in parallel universes either side, above, beneath, fore, aft, before and after them. If they met themselves coming or going it was apt to lead to all sorts of semi-impromptu hat-doffing door-holding after you no after you dances to the tune of Oh Good Grief.
Still, life’s not a still life no matter what the Association of People Who Were Still Lifelong Still-Life Artists might wish.
Mustn’t grumble.
Or fart in public.
Or both.
Especially not both and, most especially, not after an emotionally moving curry takeaway from The Passage of Thyme.
And one must do neither of those at length either, moderation apparently being recommended in all things although I seriously doubt whether demanding moderation in all things constitutes moderation in and of itself. Further, is doing neither of two things concurrently twice as difficult as not doing either one, or as not doing both serially? It makes you wonder, you must admit, even if only in absolute, total all-encompassing moderation.
Today, under pressure from his great-nephew, Harry Clarkson, who had recently taken over Europe and the cleaner parts of North Africa, Mr Cadwallader was intending to hold a sales-drive for his driving school by pushing out the boat In Terms of Publicity. Rather than actually pushing out his peculiarly-named speedboat into the public view, Mr Cadwallader just sellotaped a sign in his window, confident that given sufficient passage of time everyone would see it, some would read it and a few would be interested enough to translate it.
‘Note: this sign is not a boat, although I push it out in terms of publicity. Astral Driving Lessons available here. Patient and sympathetic instructor, everyone passes or fails their test at some time or other. Achieve infinite fuel economy, faster-than-light speed and cut the chances of an accident down to the number you just thought of. £5 an hour or part thereof. Part thereof refers to the hour, not to the £5. Apply within, initially from without. If you find yourself tempor
arily without without then you probably already have, and should begin applying immediately, since you will thus already be within the part thereof hitherto mentioned as chargeable.’
Mr Cadwallader’s beloved Hillman Avenger DL motor car was parked in the alleyway next to his shop. Well, usually it was. Sometimes it preferred the double yellow semi-parallel lines on the kerbside, generally at one of the points where they had not converged at the horizon to leave only an infinitesimally small gap between themselves. Sometimes it preferred a small crater in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon. It all depended whether Mr Cadwallader was looking for it, or whether Mr Miserable, the local Traffic Warden, or Mr Petite-Napoleon from the Driver and Velocipde Licensing Authority were hunting, as the Queen song says, for somebody to stuff. Although he was about to give astral driving lessons in it the vehicle was not actually a Vauxhall, as witnessed by the sticker in the rear window that proclaimed “Per ardua ad Hillman Avenger, not Vauxhall Astra”.
On one occasion Mr Bobbydazzler, the young village policeman, had come looking for it in connection with a case of excessive relative velocity caught on closed-circuit camera by dint of two moving frames of constabulary reference and a reliable Police computer’s Lorentz transformation. By the time the hapless constable got up to speed himself though the Hillman Avenger hadn’t been parked anywhere in the first place and was plainly nowhere to be seen in the second place. No official modern motoring protagonist had ever successfully checked the third place so that was quite out of the equation and they all agreed that the most dignified thing was to agree that none of it had ever happened. After a couple of moments they couldn’t understand why they were still talking to each other. Mr Bobbydazzler issued Mr Cadwallader with a fixed penalty notice for wasting police time and Mr Cadwallader paid it with some reluctance. Not a lot of people know that this is a payment option, and most people still pay fixed penalty notices with money.