Debatable Space

by Philip Palmer

  “I’m Brandon,” I say.

  “I’m Lena,” says the redhaired Lena.

  “No I’m Lena,” the gorgeous one says.

  “No I’m Lena!” says the Guy DR and they all giggle.

  I think I’m missing something here.

  “The battle’s over,” I tell the Lenas.

  “Shame, we missed all the fun,” redhaired Lena says scornfully.

  Flanagan joins us.

  “Three Lenas,” I explain.

  Flanagan raises his blaster and blows the heads off the Guy Lena and the Redhaired Lena.

  “One’s enough,” he says mildly.

  Lena screams with genuine horror. “Do you know how that felt?” she hisses.

  “Lena, you’re a coward,” Flanagan tells her.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I need you.”

  “I know.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Flanagan

  Like every planet owned by the Galactic Corporation, Cambria is armed with an astonishingly powerful alien-defence armoury. A ring of satellites are equipped with force fields, force nets, fusion bombs, and every other human weapon created. These weapons are of course controlled remotely via the Quantum Beacon by powerful computers on Earth. No human or DR on Cambria has authority or wherewithal to unleash anti-alien weaponry. The stakes are too high for that.

  The millions of space sensors are on constant alert for the slightest trace of Bugs, BULs, Glugs, Frondies or Sparklers. Monsters from Outer Space, in other words.

  We storm the space headquarters. We encounter no resistance. The DRs are all inert. Their strategy was clearly to sit it out until we were good and tired; and then attack again in force.

  Forty-seven hours ten minutes have elapsed since our arrival on Cambria.

  We hack into a computer link to the Space Factory, on board which ten thousand human miners work at fashioning complex metals and fabrics out of the stuff of stars and planets.

  We then fake a radio transmission which is beamed out in zipped encrypted form to the Space Factory, then transmitted back to us at the space HQ. This transmission is, of course picked up by the satellite sensors and conveyed immediately to the computers on Earth.

  The message is brief, and unclear, but the gist goes like this:

  ME:… no hope any more, can you hear me, out?

  BRANDON: Space Probe One, I am not receiving clearly, say again, say again.

  ME: We’re infested with Bugs. They’ve taken over the Quantum Beacon. I repeat…

  The signal fades.

  And so the word is out on the street. The Bugs have invaded! But will the computers take the bait?

  The Bugs, scientists think, exist at a subatomic as well as an atomic level. This explains how Bugs can penetrate any partition, apart from the crushed space of a Quantumarity. They can fly through open space. They are invulnerable. They are unstoppable. They are the most deadly thing ever created by that heartless bastard god of evolution.

  If the Bugs could escape their cage and enter a Quantum Beacon… who could say what might happen? Could a Bug Army emerge, instantaneously and intact, in the Sol system? If that happened, then all the citizens of Earth and its neighbouring space colonies would die a hideous death.

  No one knows if in fact such a thing is possible. But the fear of it is corrosive… And so, in a millionth of a second, the Earth computers analyse all the possibilities and possible outcomes and they reach a speedy decision.

  The alien defence system is mobilised. Vast energy flares hurtle through space. Asteroids and space debris are incinerated. The Space Factory itself is in the direct line of fire; it is obliterated in less time than it takes a raindrop to coalesce.

  Simultaneously, the Cambria Quantum Beacon’s defence systems are switched off. The energy flare hits with the power of a dozen suns, and the Quantum Beacon is entirely unprotected. We watch, on our screens, as the squat orbital space station that housed the Beacon vanishes in a flash of light.

  The defence system continues to hurl its deadly rain into space, but it is on automatic pilot by now. The remote computer link has been severed. The Quantum Beacon is gone; the inhabitants of the Earth system now have no way of communicating with or controlling the planet of Cambria.

  A second before the blast reaches us, all six of us are flipped out of the Cambrian system. Our DR bodies are left behind.

  The Cambrian people are now alone in space. Earth can now no longer control its robot slaves, or even contact them. And, because Cambria is a relatively remote system, it will take a hundred years (their subjective time) for a spaceship of new DRs to reach them from the nearest inhabited planet. By that time, I hope, they will be prepared.

  Finally, my people are free.

  I have saved my world from an eternity of brutality, tyranny and oppression.

  Hallefuckinglujah.

  Book 7

  Jamie

  “All right Jamie, the ball’s in your court now.” Flanagan is beaming at me, his old Dutch Uncle routine. We are all suited up, ready for whatever hell will be thrown at us.

  “Yobaby, how long we got?” On the console’s plasma screens I can see approximately. 78 million Corporation ships. We are completely surrounded. They are moving closer and closer.

  “Oh, a few minutes.”

  “Munchies.”

  The Captain produces a bar of chocolate which I scoff. Lena is standing there, looking dazed.

  “Give us a kiss sweetheart,” I tell her.

  “Give him a kiss,” Flanagan says.

  “As if,” she says scornfully, and Flanagan glares at her. She relents, and gives me a lovely kiss on the cheek. I swoon. I feel a little stirring in my trousers.

  “Do I give him a blowjob too? This is a child Flanagan! I’m not a fucking…”

  “I’m 121,” I tell her coldly.

  “You made your bed, you fucking lie in it. You’re a child.”

  She has a point. I sit at the computer. “Lena, can you fly this thing?”

  Lena sits at the joystick. She overrides the “Orbit” control and fires the space station engines. “We can’t outrun Corporation warships,” she warns me.

  “Just a little kangaroo hop will do.”

  She fires the engines. We leap up in space. The warships start firing on us. They are spooked! I bet they didn’t know that the Quantum Beacons were all built in old colony ships, and are still fully functional spacecraft. The first missiles miss, but a second later we sustain our first direct hit.

  I slip the CD-Rom into the Quantum Beacon’s computer. It boots up. The “Teleport” program begins. I map the codes manually, deleting and modifying to counteract the computer’s anti-virus programming.

  “I know what you’re doing,” says Lena, with that faraway look in her eyes. Then she starts to smile. Then she gives me another kiss, a great big smacker this time, on the lips.

  “Don’t distract him!” shouts Brandon with, I feel, a hint of jealousy. I’m beaming now, and bright red in the face. I look at the computer screen. “ACCESS DENIED” flashes up and I type in the override. I have a few seconds of pure genius.

  Lena turns to the Captain. “This isn’t a suicide mission,” she says, marvelling. “You have a way out.”

  “There’s always a way out,” says Flanagan.

  “You can teleport? You can actually do that?”

  “Not exactly,” says Flanagan.

  “I created the program!” I tell her. “I’m a genius, I’m so clever! Munchie!”

  The Captain gives me another chocolate bar. But I don’t touch it. Actually, I’m feeling a bit tired. I get that a lot these days. Mornings are okay, I always wake up with a spring in my step, and I love the way my mind hops and bounces around. I have the mental vigour of a ten-year-old, boing! boing!, my thoughts go so fast no oldie could ever keep up. Combined of course with the intellectual maturity of a man in his hundreds. Beat that, huh?

  But the truth is, I’m starting to feel my age
. I feel like Dr McCoy, in the original Star Trek, but stuck in this silly child’s body. I wish I were Jackie Chan, the 3D animated version. Then I’d be young for ever.

  “Release the escape pod,” Flanagan says and our vessel rips in half. The bridge area becomes a liferaft, powered by massive fusion engines. The bottom half of the space station houses the Quantum Beacon. Our engines fire us forward, safely out of the way of the Beacon, then we shoot “up” into space, in the small gap between the Corporation warships. They aren’t expecting this, and our brilliant stunt buys us a few moments more of life.

  The Beacon itself remains in its secure cage in the bottom half of the ship, the bit we have left behind. And I type in the final commands which instruct the Beacon to begin its teleport program. This is my masterstroke, it took me weeks, nay, months, to come up with this one. The world’s great scientists were baffled by this problem, but I found a way!

  Because, you see, the laws of nature forbid teleportation. The Universe just won’t allow it. Hence, the colony ships, and the use of DRs. It would be much easier to walk into a booth in Manhattan and teleport yourself to a planet in the Crab Nebula. But that would violate every principle of modern quantum-relativistic-multiversal string theory, otherwise known as Big Toe. (Toe stands for TOE, which stands for Theory of Everything. There is no “Little Toe”, that’s just some scientist’s idea of a gag. Is that clear or should I explain it all again with diagrams?)

  This no-teleporting law is, to me, immensely frustrating. Spock and Kirk and McCoy used to teleport all the time, though for some reason it only worked over short distances from ship to planet. Jeannie the Meanie does it every week in her teatime show I’m a Space Traveller with “tude. Black Hole Holidays is a show entirely based around the assumption that instant teleportation between planets is possible, and for years I thought the space travellers were real people. (They’re not! They’re actors! It’s all a fake! Stay with me, guys, I’m full of these kinds of insights.) But in the real world, tragically, teleportation just can’t happen.

  Except, I discovered, the logic of the Quantum Beacon’s quantum paralleling system does allow, in theory, one very limited form of teleportation. This involves patches of space becoming “paired”. First, you program the computer to identify two patches of space which have a roughly comparable pattern of matter distribution. Because of quantum fuzz, this can be a fairly approximate pairing; in quantum reality, a chair and a table would be pretty well indistinguishable. (In fact, the chair would be a table some of the time – baffling, huh?) Both of the paired-up patches of space need to be, obviously, in the region of a Quantum Beacon.

  Then you take detailed quantum-state readings of both patches of space, using nanotechnology and very powerful computers. You with me still?

  And then, using multi-dimensional infraction theory, the space itself is teleported. Not the matter inside it, not the energy, but the space itself.

  This requires (whew!) a reversal of the usual Einsteinian/Leibnitzian principle that all reality can be described in terms of the relationship between things. But it’s not that space is a Thing in Itself, a like, you know, noumenon. It’s the curvature of space, the displacedness of space, that’s identified and teleported. Here’s the patronising metaphor: Imagine a bed with a hollow in it, where a person has been sleeping. Now imagine that hollow can be swapped for the hollow in another, different bed. No one will ever notice the difference; but the hollows will have interchanged. Space will have teleported.

  That’s my theory. No one has ever thought of doing it before because, I suppose, it is a totally stupid and futile thing to do. What’s the point of teleporting space! But there is a point. (Finally! Eventually!) The point is:

  It doesn’t really work. Space does get teleported, but the process is messy and ugly and it does weird things to dimensional reality.

  Things such as this. We look at our plasma screen and see the Corporation warships turn and prepare to pursue. We are a nippy little minnow skeetering off into the ocean. They are the barracudas and the sharks. They will outrun us easily.

  But then a green light flashes on my screen. The Teleport function has engaged. It covers a region of space large enough to encircle the warships – but not large enough to encircle us! You see! All this has been carefully and brilliantly planned! The space is then teleported and swapped for a portion of space near a Quantum Beacon in area Q432 of the Milky Way.

  And at the precise moment in which spatial teleportation occurs, space itself is rent in a multiplicity of twains.

  Just for an instant.

  In fact, less than an instant, a tiny portion of an instant, one times ten to the power of millions. But for that brief period, space does what space shouldn’t do. It isn’t there.

  The consequences of the rift in space are cataclysmic. To us, from our vantage point speeding niftily away, it’s as if a giant god with an invisible hand has squeezed the Universe. The Corporation warships are crushed instantaneously, and a huge tidal wave of pressure rushes through space. Our ship is tossed and hurled around, suns flare, planets are caught in vast whirlpools hurling round at light speed and further distorting dimensional reality as relativistic effects kick in.

  We are swatted away from this vast dimensional hurricane like a fly, and we hurtle through space. Our engines explode. Our hull melts and reforms. Then the Beacon ship itself falls to pieces around us.

  We are left floating free in space, secure in our spacesuits. Alby throws his lattice net around us again, and tows us through deep space. I am weeping tears of amazement.

  What a fucking mess I just caused! What a total gross-out fucking up of reality!

  I ripped a piece of space. No man or child has ever done so much.

  I’m the king of the castle!

  Alby

  We float through spaccccee for nearly two years. I find it relaxing. I accept that the ressst of them are sssuffering badly. But they do have food and fluid in their suits, enough to keep them alive for five yearsssss in all.

  At lassst, we are picked up by a merchant ship. I flicker away on the outssside of the ship, doing my imperssssonation of a waning comet. The others recccceive their creature comfortsss and a lift to the nearessst habitable planet.

  Another ten yearsss passss.

  Lena

  I’m conscious there is something of an atmosphere. I am not as popular as I would like.

  This I find peculiar. After all, since I am technically still their hostage, I could have betrayed them all to the Captain of the merchant vessel which picked us up. I could have denounced them as pirates. But then, I suppose, if I had done that, they would simply have killed the Captain and stolen the ship.

  Instead – they took the Captain prisoner, and stole his ship. After great debate, it was decided to put the Captain into cryo-sleep. This was a one-man merchant vessel, mainly run by autopilot. The Captain had taken his cargo through 200 light-years of space, most of it spent in coma. Strictly speaking the ship could run without him; but he was the human failsafe. He was, like all such merchant Captains, a sour, embittered, supremely well read intellectual. In other periods, he would have been a professor in a university. These days, such people are sent on long lonely space journeys with computer access to every academic book and journal ever published. When he reaches his destination, this Captain will publish an academic treatise based on nearly forty years of intensive study. Occasionally, during that period, he would have had to veer around an asteroid swarm. But generally, it’s an easy life.

  This particular Captain is, as it happens, clinically insane. I read his treatise and it was utter gibberish. But still, the ship sailed on. Rather than bicker about who should have the one cryo-berth, we stuck the mad fucker in it and aged ten years.

  I decided to use this period to be sociable, and to make myself the undisputed social and emotional heart of the group. I was motherly yet sexual to little Jamie. I spoke to Harry about the bleak loneliness of my life, and my awe at the bea
uty of the universe. I asked Alliea gently about love, and encouraged her to tell me stories of her exploits with her lover Rob during his long and ill-advised boxing career.

  I wrangled with Brandon about the design of spaceships, and impressed him with my first-hand knowledge of the great ship designers – Bartleby, Smith, Malone and Davis. And I exuded all my available pheromones with Kalen, sensing her peculiar half-cat sexual energy that drew her to me as a fellow predator and sexually rapacious female. We did not physically consummate our love; but each day, I perfumed her erotically. I know, by now, how to control my own scent emissions; I can drive any man or woman insane with desire with the rank smell of my own heat. But with Kalen I am more subtle; I toy with her, I seduce her, I enthral her.

  And yet, the fact of the matter is, they all hate me. Kalen in particular treats me with an angry scorn. Why? Because of my one error during the battle of Cambria? The fact that instead of joining my companions in battle, I went off and, as it were, using the common but inelegant idiom, fucked myself?

  We won, didn’t we! What’s the problem with these people!

  And as for Jamie – what a selfish spoiled child! I’ve spent hours bonding with him, listening to his favourite nu-heavymetalthrashpunk music bands, talking about quantum theory, showing him my favourite cartoons. And he calls me “oppressive” and “mommyish”. “Mommyish!” Me! I’m the most toxic femme fatale in outer space!

  Alliea, of course, is an emotional cripple. I’ve tried explaining to her how she was locked in a symbiotic-dependency relationship with Rob, unable to have an opinion unless he shared it, unable to enjoy an experience unless he was enjoying it too. I outlined for her the basic principles of Inner Self Management as expounded in the New Guru books of the twenty-second century. I tried to teach her forgetting-remembering mantras, which allow us to control and corral potent memories so that they are no longer present in the subconscious mind, but can be easily recalled with a simple verbal trigger. For Alliea’s mind is a blur and jumble of memories of happy and tragic times with this, frankly, brute of a man. She needs to lock them away, and keep the key safe; that way she can get on and advance herself emotionally.