Debatable Space

by Philip Palmer

  “Abandon,” says Jamie,

  “ship” adds Brandon.

  I mentally assess the state of play. Our ship is destroyed. It’s a hull with holes.

  “Oh shit,” I say.

  We abandon ship. There’s a flurry and a hurry and a panic and the fear in the pit of my stomach has been converted into a desperate urge to void myself into my body armour, I am paralysed with indecision about whether to breathe and vomit, but my body moves almost without conscious control. We suit up, we plunge down tubes into the centre of the ship, where I resume command of my stellar yacht, while Flanagan and his crew take the lifeboat. I scream a command, and the hull doors shoot open and we are catapulted into space. As we leave, more missiles hit our megawarship, and our two small vessels are plunged into the haze and blaze of the massive bombardment.

  We fly through space, me in my yacht, the others in the ion-drive liferaft. And Alby flares his way along with us, tugging a lattice net woven with nanobombs. The sun is behind us, and the wrecked hull of our ship suddenly erupts, filling the air with flame and burning plasma. In the confusion, the yacht, lifeboat and Alby creep past the enemy craft towards the vast spaceship where the Beacon is housed.

  There is, I realise, belatedly, a plan, though I was not made privy to it. Flanagan starts suggesting orders over his suit radio, which I meekly repeat to the others as if they are my ideas. And so, with the enemy behind us, Alby drapes his net over the Quantum Beacon ship’s holding bay. The lattice sticks, the bombs explode inwards, a vast hole appears in the side of the Beacon ship’s vast hull. The lifeboat punches its way through, while Kalen and Harry and Flanagan parachute down on light carbon chutes, riding the blast of the explosion and zooming through into the inside of the vessel.

  Meanwhile, heeding Flanagan’s barked instructions in my ear-radio, I head in the other direction, arcing the stellar yacht away at exhilarating speed. Then I pull hard on the ship’s joystick and turn my vessel around and bring it to a momentary halt. I aim my lasers at the sun. I fire.

  The lasers penetrate and shatter the sun’s energy equilibrium. And the sun then flares, engulfing us all in a vast shimmering photosphere, too diffuse to burn, but bright enough to blind the ’bots and the remote operators, and scrambling all the communication channels.

  My ship is hurled around the flaring sun, at a speed no faster than light but more intense than mere movement. I feel like a cloud caught in a typhoon, a droplet of water in a waterfall, a photon at the heart of a nuclear blast.

  My heart in hiding stirs for a bird, the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

  Flanagan

  “Good plan,” says Brandon, snidely.

  “It worked,” I snarl.

  “We lost our ship!”

  “We’ll get another.”

  “All our possessions! Our archives, your guitars, my collection of collectable animated superhero bendy toys!”

  “It worked! We’re in, aren’t we?”

  “In where?”

  Brandon has a point. This is a seriously weird place. The Quantum Beacon ship is hollow on the inside. A vast cavernous space. The crew inhabited a thin space that constituted the shell of a huge empty egg. We have defeated the Beacon’s crew, disabled their ’bots, but what have we actually captured? A big shitload of nothing…

  “Lena will know,” I say confidently.

  “Aye aye Cap’n.”

  Lena’s stellar yacht is nowhere to be seen. The flaring of the sun has kickstarted her yacht and sent it out into space armed with so much potential energy it can reach the nearest planetary system in less than fifteen years. She has, in short, escaped. Thanks to me.

  “Where,” I ask despairingly, “is the fucking thing that does whatever the fuck this fucking thing does?”

  Lena

  The Quantum Beacon inhabits No Space. It exists at a fold in reality, in a no-place curled within the three unfurled and seven furled dimensions of our eleven-dimensional (counting time as the eleventh dimension of course) universe. It is undetectable by human perception or human-built sensors. It can, however, be liberated and revealed by a simple proton-positron interaction that yields the Beacon’s potential. All you need to do is to enter a two hundred digit code via the ship’s hard drive.

  And my remote computer knows the code.

  I wonder, idly, about going back. There is something appealing about their mad quixotic vision. And they need me. They really do need me. Oxygen supplies: 4 hours 40 minutes.

  What? Oxygen transmuter has been destroyed by a corroder virus. Remaining oxygen supplies 4 hours 39 minutes.

  When did this happen? It came to my awareness eleven seconds ago.

  Sabotage. A fair surmise.

  We have to go back. A valid extrapolation.

  That fucking bastard boobytrapped us. A very fair comment.

  Fuck him! Fuck, indeed, him.

  Lena

  I arrive back in a flaming temper. Flanagan is deferential and helpless. “Thank God you’re here, Lena, you’re the only one who knows what to do!” he says. He’s right, of course, but his arse-licking flattery offends me.

  Grudgingly, I type in the code and access the Beacon. Then I rig the Beacon to connect with Flanagan’s coordinates. His strategy now seems clear. He has targeted the Beacon to link us remotely with his home world of Cambria. This is the culmination of his lifelong dream of revenge.

  As I work, the crew gradually gather in the control room. When I look up, they are all staring at me.

  “You’re back, huh?” says Jamie tauntingly.

  “I would never abandon my loyal crew,” I tell him. He openly sneers. He probably did the sabotage job on the yacht. Little brat. Oh, how I would love to seal him into an enclosed space filled with flesh-eating maggots and leave him there.

  “Do you think I’m cute?” Jamie asks me abruptly. I am brought up short. I study him – his tousled hair, his freckles, his cheeky grin.

  “Not in the least, worm,” I say. His face falls.

  “We won’t have much time,” I tell Flanagan crisply.

  “I know,” he replies, lowstatusly and humbly.

  “They’ll be sending rescue vessels.”

  “It’ll take them forty-eight hours to reach us.”

  “Leaving us forty-eight hours to escape.”

  “There is no escape. Forty-eight hours, and they have us. It’s a suicide mission.”

  What!

  “And why should I agree to that idiotic idea?” I snap.

  “You don’t have to. You’ve shown us what we have to do. Now, you can go. Take the yacht. We’ll make sure you have sufficient oxygen this time. Nice meeting you.”

  I make a petulant face. “Go!” he insists. “We don’t need you any more!” Lena, this is a patronisingly obvious piece of manipulation.

  “Go you cowardly bitch!” Jamie snarls.

  “Please go,” says Flanagan. “Save yourself! I couldn’t bear you to be hurt.”

  “Lena,” says Kalen, imploringly. “You’ve done enough, it’s our battle now.”

  “It probably won’t work anyway,” says Brandon snidely. “I mean, what would you know about quantum engineering?”

  A sheet of flame hits the ceiling. Globules of fiery tears drip from ceiling to floor.

  “Lena,” hisses Alby, “I admire you sssso very much.”

  “I’m staying,” I tell Flanagan, stubbornly. Oh, Lena.

  Harry

  This is not my idea of battle. I’m strapped to a chair, my furred limbs in restraints, wires leading into my brain. In the world outside, warships are on their way to destroy and explode me. But I, meanwhile, will be in cyberspace, inhabiting a robot body, fighting on a world which is not my own, for a people who are not my own, in a cause which is not my own.

  I signed up for this, apparently.

  Curiously, I feel a surge of curiosity. What will it be like, I wonder, not to be me?

  Not to be Loper?

  To be, so very nearly, a proper h
uman being?

  Lena

  As I prepare for battle, I relax by mulling over the principles of the Quantum Beacons and Heimdall. The mathematics is formidably hard, and to be honest, I have forgotten whatever I once knew. But the basic principle is:

  (Are you getting this?) Of course.

  The basic principle is: Matter cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Einstein proved it, and no one since has found a way around it. This constitutes an absolute limit on human progress. We cannot ever travel the other galaxies and stars, let alone traverse the Universe, or master the myriad worlds of creation. It takes too long to get there.

  But, without wishing to brag, as the creator of Heimdall, or co-creator, or major inspirer of, or considerable influence on the development of – well anyway! regardless of what my actual role was; in the construction of Heimdall, we found a way to solve the conundrum. The twin-track colonisation of space. And it was a masterly solution. You see, we… You’ve explained all this.

  Hush, Now, let me tell the story chronologically. After the first robot landfall on Hope, the other colony ships began to reach their destinations. And each colony was equipped with infinite energy resources thanks to the energy pumps; and remained in constant instant contact with Earth, thanks to Heimdall. The manipulation of quantum states means, as I have indeed explained before, but I’m recapping now for the benefit of the slower-witted among you; this manipulation allows for the instantaneous transmission of information. So in effect, we have a Universe in which distances are vast and onerous to travel; but in which email and phone communication are instant and effortless.

  And thus, and so, the other planets were colonised by the colony ships. After Hope, there was Endurance, Enterprise, Beauty, Shiva, Mecca, Mayflower, New Earth, and a myriad other planets, since each new colony routinely built and launched its own new colony ships.

  And in order to experience and help colonise these alien planets, a human based in the Earth system has to merely sign up for a tour of duty. The human’s body is placed in a flotation tank, and electrodes placed in the brain and on the skin and genitals. And, on the alien planet, a Doppelganger Robot is built with the ability to experience the full gamut of sensory data – sight, touch, hearing, pain. It thus becomes possible for a human being based on Earth to “live” on an alien planet by switching a single switch and inhabiting the DR body.

  The question is, though: why? Why give up your life on Earth, with all its luxuries and pleasures, in order to endure life on a hellish alien planet?

  Because it’s addictive. I was totally hooked on it. My years of mainlining Hope were the best and most enjoyable of my entire life. And so many other humans shared my excitement and addiction. A huge and tax-free salary for doing part-time DR work also helps to motivate the Earth populace to do their duty…

  And thanks to my son the Cheo, it is these DRs who are the dominant citizens and, indeed, masters of all the occupied planets. And so, ultimately, it is Earth Humans who have all the power, all the control. So instead of a Universe of freely acting nation planets, as I had always envisaged, we have a host of slave planets, run by DRs, on behalf of Earth Humans.

  I played my role in creating this corrupt network of space tyranny. I take no credit for that. For once, I ask for no credit. I merely, each morning, in those cruel minutes before my optimism of spirit kicks in, suffer and squirm in shame and bitter regret. For the way things are in this Universe of ours is wrong.

  “Strap up, Lena.”

  I realise we are about to launch our invasion. I look around at my army – six of us strapped into armchairs, with Kalen at the control console.

  “Let’s kick some robot ass,” says Flanagan, with an attempt at rousingness.

  “It was my turn to say that,” Jamie tells him bitterly.

  Flanagan sighs, wearily.

  “Let’s go,” he says.

  Book 6

  Flanagan

  Six robots stand on a hilltop and look down at the rolling green hills of Cambria and breathe in fresh tangy air. The sound of birds is shrill and lovely in the sky. The sun beats down, and the robots sweat, and feel the heat as pleasure. A two-headed push-me-pull-you stag wanders in front of them, and one of its heads flicks a curious glance at them. But the stag has no fear of humanoid creatures. Only humans are hunted on this planet.

  I look around at my home planet and I feel a surge of pleasure that cannot be described. The here-ness, now-ness, mine-ness, the truth of the place overwhelm me. This is a land my people created, with centuries of hard toil and bleak dangerous existence. They died in dust storms, they were consumed in random solar flares that poured deadly radiation into every inch of the planet. They bombed the planet’s core to release its icy heart, and used its melted water to create a planet-wide system of waterways. They carefully nurtured Earth-born seeds and sperm and grew fields and orchards and meadows, and filled them with rabbits, badgers, stags, dogs, butterflies, and a whole host of other flora and fauna. And solar panels in orbit around Cambria’s sun provided limitless power to fuel this work.

  I look at my fellow Doppelganger Robots. We are an imposing group. Each of us (apart from Harry) is seven foot or more in height, heavily muscled, beautiful, graceful, godlike. Alliea DR is black, with fiery eyes, and a slender waist that is dwarfed by perfect breasts and bulging thighs. Lena DR is coffee-coloured, deadly thin, with long white hair that sails in the wind. Jamie DR is shaven-bald, white, with his huge arms bare and tattooed, but despite his muscle-bound physique he moves with the grace of a leopard. Brandon is cool, lean, clad in black, with black staring eyes. And I – I am built like a gladiator.

  We are all of us (apart from Harry) variations on the same theme. We are comic book wish-fulfilment fantasies made real, par for the course for Doppelganger Robots. And our style options were, frankly, limited. There was a wide stock of out-of-service DRs available to us to hack into, and we took the least garish ones.

  But entertainingly, Harry DR stands a foot shorter than the rest of us, and has a beard, and fake glasses and spindly frame. He is a Boffin DR, a different fantasy – wish-fulfilment for an Earth-bound Jock who wants to experience the perverse thrill of being a weedy geek. But despite his slight physique, Harry DR has the same enhanced strength as all Doppelganger Robots. We can run faster, punch harder, and withstand more physical pain and stress than any human born.

  Today, we go to war.

  Lena

  It’s been four hours since we escaped from the warehouse where the DR bodies were stored, and every moment has been sheer bliss. Apart from my brief visit to the planet Wild West, I’ve been in free space for over a hundred years. It’s wonderful to, once again, smell flowers and cow shit, and have a skin that changes temperature as the sun goes in and out of clouds. I feel alive.

  Curiously, though, I feel disengaged from the enterprise of which I am, notionally, the leader. Flanagan defers to me constantly, but I just murmur, “Up to you.” I feel intoxicated by life and by the newness of my oh-so-perfect body. And liberated, too, by the lack of fear. If this body is destroyed, I can hack into another one. If a tooth falls out, I can will it to grow back. For the duration of my stay on this planet, I am invulnerable, immortal, self-renewing.

  On my return to the Quantum Beacon, however, I face certain death; curiously, that doesn’t perturb me.

  After activating the six DRs in the warehouse, we worked hard on the next stage of our – Flanagan’s – plan. The other DRs in storage were neutralised and de-brained; it will take weeks of work to restore them to working order. Then we packed a truck with missiles, guns, body armour and camera-bots. There was no security to contend with inside the warehouse because, of course, in the normal course of things only Earth computers can access the interior of such places. No one expected that the system could be breached via a conquered Quantum Beacon that allowed us to hack into the Cambrian mainframe.

  We did have to fight our way out however. It was a short sharp shock experience f
or the four DR guards, who found themselves outgunned and totally taken by surprise. Their heads were blown off their bodies, causing immediate deactivation of the DR-Human link.

  In a stolen truck, we screeched a route through the city outskirts and parked near the top of the highest hill we could find. And now, Brandon opens up the boxes and releases the camera-bots. Flanagan dials an all-sets-to-be-activated telephone number and the ringtone on every mobile phone on the planet beeps, or hums, or sings, or plays piano or guitar or orchestra. We have just phoned the entire planet. ..

  And, when every human being on Cambria switches on his vidphone, he or she sees Flanagan and the rest of us standing on a hilltop, in a deliberately iconic and dangerous pose. “We are your liberators,” Flanagan says earnestly into the camera, and I feel a prickle of excitement run down my spine.

  Flanagan speaks eloquently. But my mind is not on his mission, or his passion, or his eloquence. I am obsessed by the heat on my brow, the smells in my nostrils, and my ultimate sense of power. I have the body I always dreamed of, the body of a warrior-woman-queen-goddess. There’s only so much you can do with flesh and a human genetic heritage; I always feel my real body is a pale imitation of the dream which inspires it.

  Now I inhabit my own dream.

  And in the background of my self-loving, self-glorifying hymn to myself, I dimly register Flanagan’s words:

  “I am one of you. A citizen of this planet. This is a revolution. We will throw off our shackles. We will be free. All you have to do is…”

  “ Do nothing. Whether you are on the surface, or dwelling in your underground cavern, stop what you are doing, and focus on the doing of nothing. Sit down, if you can. Eat, if you have food, but chew silently. Do not speak, do not listen if a DR speaks to you. Do not obey instructions from a DR. If you are shot and lie bleeding and dying on the ground, do not whimper or groan. Die silently, die like a human, die proud.