Debatable Space

by Philip Palmer

  Then the air solidifies into a black floating particle. More particles swarm, to form a shape, a letter. The letter grows. It is the shape and size of a standing human being without limbs. It is an I . A free-floating I which is almost as big as I am. Then the I flickers and changes, and I realise what is happening. The air is talking to me. The air is talking to me.

  And it says:

  I stare at Flanagan.

  “You’re insane,” I tell him.

  “I have no choice,” he says flatly.

  The letters shimmer a little more and turn into a humanoid shape. The humanoid black shape sits in an armchair, and crosses one humanoid leg over another.

  The humanoid shape is, I know, made of billions upon billions of microscopic entities, swarming under the control of a focused group intelligence. It is an alien being that is alien beyond imagining.

  Flanagan has forged a treaty with the Bugs.

  I am in the same room as Bugs.

  Every pore and follicle on my body shivers in horror. I feel as if my skin is being ripped off. I cannot breathe.

  The Bug entity shimmers and changes its shape again. It is, I realise, trying to find a succinct way of indicating friendly and non-aggressive intentions towards me. But the shape it chooses is surreally inappropriate. It heightens my panic attack. It makes me almost insane, torn between a desire to hoot with laughter and an overwhelming urge to defecate then die.

  This is what the Bug becomes:

  “Oh no,” I say. “Oh merciful heaven, no!”

  Book 9

  Excerpt from the thought diary of Lena Smith, 2004

  I have wasted a lot of years.

  I have been drunk, drugged, lazy, stupefied, and just plain idle. Like Samuel Beckett, I once spent a year in bed. Like Winnie the Pooh, I have gorged myself until my stomach has bulged. I have also, aimlessly, foolishly, doodled away entire months doing nothing apart from tidying and making a mess and tidying it up again, a little differently.

  Most galling of all, I spent two hard desperate years writing a novel into which I poured my heart and life and soul and entire family history, and which I showed to people whose opinion I respect. They all hated it. In fact, I lost some of my dearest friends because of what they considered to be the dreary drabness of my writing.

  So I turned, again, to drink and drugs. I spent ten years as an addict and had to have a liver transplant. I snorted coke and bought a new septum. I mainlined and OD’d and mixed crack with LSD and ecstasy and almost died, several times.

  But I knew what I was doing. I was pacing myself. I knew I had a long life ahead of me. I wanted to be sure I left no experience unexplored.

  For in my time, I have sky-dived. I have scuba-dived. I have had gonorrhoea. I have been a high-class prostitute. I have been a professional gambler. I have had sex with a movie star. I have read A La Recherche du Temps Perdu in the original French. I have listened to and appreciated every single symphony and major work by Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Chopin and Sidelman. I have spent a year in China. I have spent a year in India. I have spent numerous years in Italy. I have been a step-mum to squawling babies and angry toddlers. I have been unfaithful. I have been faithful. I have committed murder. I have been to jail. I have been brain-fried for my crimes, and I have survived with my rage intact. I have escaped from prison. I have white-water-rafted and I have been a fashion model. I have been a good mother. I have been a bad mother. I have been burgled. I have been flayed, twice. I have been a thief. I have written, as I said, a deeply underrated novel. I have composed several symphonies. I have learned a dozen languages. I have been a concert pianist. I have written best-selling academic books. I have had friends who are transsexuals and homosexuals and celibates. I have loved, and been loved, and I have had my heart broken more times than I can count.

  And for almost one hundred years, I was the leader of humankind.

  That last part sounds unlikely, I know. Even now, it seems like a dream that such a thing could have happened. I have lost touch with the person I was then: focused, political, manipulative. I networked ceaselessly, eighteen hours a day and more, in person, on the phone, and by email. I wrote game plans of objectives to be achieved and day by day, month by month, I ticked off my successes. And by this means – carefully, ruthlessly, cynically – I achieved ultimate power.

  It came about, in the first instance, because of my experience with Future Dreams. After experiencing the very worst of human corruption and injustice, I was left with a burning urge to change things in the world. Admittedly, it was decades before I did anything about that urge, and I drank a lot of margaritas and screwed a lot of men in this delightful interim. But the seed had been sowed. And it finally germinated.

  I was unemployed, a recovering alcohol and drug addict, and I had just been betrayed by a philandering man. So I called up all my contacts in the hope of getting academic work – and it was a complete washout. So instead, randomly, I applied for a job with the UN. And I became a junior manager of a UN-funded project in Portugal. This was, of course, after the Worst Hundred Years, when the collapse of the ecosystem had caused astonishing devastation and loss of life across the planet. For much of the time when I had been drinking and taking drugs and having sex, Florida and Spain were flooded, Central America was devastated by malarial infection, and much of Europe had turned to desert. However, huge progress had been made in restoring the Earth’s damaged biosphere. And the UN was pioneering the recovery process.

  So for sixteen years I laboured with the other UN workers to heal the land, cure the sick and reseed the empty oceans. It was an extraordinary, exhilarating time; we all knew that we were doing something genuinely good. And in this period I had a glorious sense of what it was to have the nationality Human. We were all bonded together, in a joint enterprise; and day by painful day, our world was saved.

  But once the principles of ecostability were more fully understood, the pace of progress increased. Vast floating carbon traps cleared the air of man-made emissions. Plankton swarmed in the oceans. Cod replenished and filled the seas. Frozen helium chilled the poles, and the ice froze again. The equilibrium was restored; the Earth started to heal itself.

  And, as the years went by, I felt ambition crept up on me. Once the crisis was over, most of my work became repetitive and clerical and mundane. I knew I had the experience to do more than I was doing – and I yearned to be the leader and not the led.

  So I applied myself to that task, with all the focus of a heat-seeking missile. For the first time in my life, I made it my objective to climb the greasy pole. And I applied all my talent and knowledge to that single, soulless task.

  I undermined my rivals with psychological gambits. I worked on my skills and my contacts and I ceaselessly, endlessly, flattered those who might be of use to me. I worked long hours, I flirted with my Portuguese boss and even had sex with him a few times. I became a socialite and a gossip. I was promoted from deputy manager to manager; I was transferred to a new project in France; and from there I became a member of the UN hierarchy, on a roaming global brief.

  And within seven years, I became Deputy Vice President of the UN during a time of great political upheaval.

  In my first year in this new job, I wrote a definitive paper on the new world order, in which I tried to analyse with scientific precision the problems facing mankind – and also the solutions. Energy, I concluded, was the answer to most of these problems. Others agreed. And a year later, a superconductive energy pump was invented which, when placed in close orbit, could convert heat from the sun’s rays into invisible beams of energy that provided near-limitless power to fuel our consumerist technological society.

  Four years later, I resigned from the UN and became a British Member of Parliament. I had a constituency in Greenock, and I gave my maiden speech in the house on the subject of urban regeneration. I wrote a column for a newspaper, I campaigned on behalf of consumers and factory workers. I appeared on comic quiz shows and became a cult figure.<
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  And after thirteen years of this relentless hard work, I became Leader of the Opposition.

  Five years after that I became Prime Minister. I had my photograph on the staircase next to Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Matthews, Thomas, Jones, Durbridge, Smith, Andrews, and McQuist. I dined with the Queen, I opened factories, I traded insults at Question Time, I feuded with my Chancellor, I put a brave face on economic adversity, I pandered to Middle Britain, I gave approval for a vast underground motor and railway to join Glasgow, Cardiff and London. I did, well, really, all sorts of things. I have a list somewhere. I should be prouder, I suppose, though after this long distance of time, all I can remember is that most British MPs drink formidable quantities of Scotch whisky and pride themselves on being raconteurs, even when they aren’t.

  And then, after four years in office, I shocked everyone by resigning in order to launch my campaign to be appointed Ambassador for Humanity. This was a new job created as a token sop to liberals who urged an end to nationalism and factionalism. But in my view, it was a post which offered wider horizons and greater challenges than being the cat’s-paw of the Liberal Democratic Socialist Alliance Party.

  I got the job as Ambassador. And I felt like a hawk with a healed wing. After all the petty backbiting of British politics, finally it felt as if I had a proper job. I soared and pounced and soared some more. And after a while, I changed my job title to “President of Humanity”.

  Once self-appointed in this way, I went on to run the Council for the Improvement of Humankind. And I became, through force of personality, and sheer weight of groundbreaking ideas, the de facto leader of the human race.

  Talk about goal-oriented! All it takes is drive, stamina, shamelessness, a shit-caked tongue, and a modicum of ability.

  As the first-ever President of Humanity, I had a new office built for me in Brussels, with 3D wallpaper that could be transformed at the clap of two hands into a map of the solar system. I explored the limits of my new expense account. I learned how to power-dress.

  And I studied the art of how to rule the human race. I read every book I could think of – from Machiavelli to Plato. And I adapted the principles of political governance by referring it back to my People Matrix based on the emergence equations I’d created so many years before. Using those equations instead of blind instinct, I forged a new way forward. I devised a computer program that would allow me to map and extrapolate political changes before they happened. I was able, therefore, to foresee and prevent revolutions in France and Louisiana. I forged a pact between China and Japan. I defanged the neo-cons of America, already discredited after their failed policies of the early twenty-first century. And I created an elite corps of aides who acted on my behalf with all the ruthlessness of Tom and Tosh and Michiyo and the others in the old days of the World Police. I never killed my political enemies; I merely discredited, undermined and humiliated them.

  Those were the days…!

  And it was during this period that we launched the second wave of space colonists. I was forced to say goodbye to my beloved son, who had been (once again) accused of rape. I had to falsify his records to get him aboard, to expunge all evidence of his assorted crimes, but I did it with a clear conscience. He was less dangerous in space, I argued to myself, than back here on Earth.

  And when he had left, I became acutely aware that my life’s work had to be finding a way to secure the future of those colonists who had risked so much for an uncertain step forward for mankind.

  A few years later, the first wave of colonists achieved landfall, on Hope. The very first Quantum Beacon was built. And Heimdall started to come into being. I was ready for the challenges thrown at me. I was the right person, at the right time, in the right job.

  I had a simple philosophy of power, which I called the Pournelle Doctrine, after one of my favourite writers. The doctrine is this: Problems have solutions. Mass starvation in Africa is caused by lack of resources, lack of water, corruption and war. So I helped turn the African nations into self-contained energy-generating commercial entities with fertile fields and vast underground industrial estates. Dictators were punished with loss of trading rights. Greed triumphed; and thus, wars started to vanish. Financial corruption was replaced by dependency on the joys and exhilaration of a twenty-third-century lifestyle.

  I created a complex system of virtuous circles where non-malign behaviour was rewarded with greater health, wealth, and longer life. Poverty was eliminated by endless energy resources. The population explosion was – as Pournelle himself prophesied all those years ago – a self-solving problem, because as wealth increases, family size decreases. Even the issue of land was becoming less and less of an issue, as we sent colony ships of Palestinians and Eastern Europeans into the brave new lands of space.

  I was, essentially, a passive-aggressive dictator. I controlled every aspect of the behaviour of everyone on Earth; but I presented the facade of being the follower of humanity’s dreams. Like an old-fashioned wife from days gone by, I made all the decisions, but let my sap of a husband believe that he was running things.

  And yes, I admit I had my vanities. The name change was one. From Lena to Xabar. I dressed in tight-fitting shimmering plasto-leather suits, I cultivated an image as a woman with a dangerous past. I played a role really – I reinvented myself as an ancient warrior chieftainess in modern times. I was Boudicca, I was a cartoon heroine, I was Xabar. In a world dominated by grey and middle-aged politicians, I was the candle, and I was also the flame.

  This was, of course, all calculated. I packaged my essence up into a series of connected myths and sold them all, all at the same time. I sold the myth of the obedient servant of humanity; and I sold the myth of the sexy dominatrix. I sold the myth of the ice maiden warrior princess who could kick male ass; and I sold the myth of the nurturing, gentle, mother/sister/lover. I was alpha, beta, gamma and omega, all rolled into one. I was left-wing, right-wing, conservative, liberal, sluttish, puritanical, dangerous, safe.

  It was politics as prestidigitation, sizzle not steak. But there was a steak. There was substance to what I did. I wasn’t, as some argued, a bimbo apparatchik. I was a visionary. But a visionary in a sexy suit, with a weird name, and a knack of being whatever people wanted her to be.

  Then, after about twenty years, the look changed. I became more severe, more forbidding. As my policies became more liberal, my look became more starched. I wore stiff suits and disapproved of nudity in television commercials. I became Nanny – fair, firm, but innately puritanical and moralistic. That worked, too, for a good while.

  Then I appointed a good-looking Vice President and for ten years or so, it was assumed that he was the power behind the throne. It was rumoured we were lovers, and that I was going to stand down in favour of him. I can’t, for the life of me, remember his name. I can easily look it up, but I choose not to. When my policies started to run into difficulties, he became my fall guy. He left, I stayed. Life carried on.

  Of course, each nation on Earth had its own ruler; and each country was sovereign, and powerful. My role in “Presiding” over the Council of Humanity was simply to coordinate and liaise. But the reality was, leaders of nation states came and went. They lost at elections, they were assassinated, they died of heart failure. But I stayed – constantly reinventing myself, and my role. And in this way, I became for a period almost all-powerful.

  At first, I travelled constantly. But as time went by I relied heavily on my vidscreens in my office in Brussels (and, latterly, in an annexe of the Houses of Parliament in London.) I was, of course, spending every night in the virtual reality of Hope, inhabiting the bodies of Doppelganger Robots as a frontier was tamed, and a planet was terraformed. So when my days began, my head was pounding with memories of sandstorms and appalling deaths and great heroism. But I developed a knack of effortlessness that allowed me to glide through paperwork and answer phenomenal numbers of emails. I vidphoned a hundred messages a day and buzzed them out in batches. It was rare
for me to have actual conversations. I preferred people to pitch me proposals by email, so I had time to simmer on them; and then I announced my decisions.

  And so we savoured the twenty-third century, the period in which the human race changed for ever. Microchip brain implants became standard and so virtually every human being had access to all the knowledge of all the ages. Bodies and faces could be changed like suits, with the vagaries of fashion. The first genetically engineered humans appeared – the “gillpeople”, who could breathe in oxygen through water, and who were eventually evolved into the Dolphs. There was a whole new generation of 100 Plusers, wars were unheard of, the distant planets were being colonised. Boxing was outlawed. Prostitution was taxed at a higher tax band. Children were maturing faster, learning faster; teenagers were force-fed knowledge, but in their twenties the new generation of “twoers” experienced the sheer joy of a gap decade before entering the world of work.

  The famines in Africa were a thing of the past. After the catastrophic climate disasters of the late twenty-second century, the climate was now in a state of stable homeostasis, no longer oscillating between global warming and Ice Age. Music was, frankly, shit; even by my standards. Popular and classical alike, music was well and truly up itself. But painting had entered a renaissance, and wall murals of staggering beauty by the world’s greatest artists covering whole city blocks and skyscrapers could be found in every capital city.

  And the problems of the human race were being solved. They were being solved. Problems have solutions; you just have to find them.

  The pressure on me was, however, phenomenal, and my workload was crippling. And after nearly ninety years in power, I began planning my retirement. But first, I ushered in my repeal of the penal laws – which meant the eradication of prison in favour of electronic and behaviour-modifying torture as a punishment for offences. The “brain-frying” of armed robbers and murders proved to be chillingly effective. Crime plummeted; and those who used to be career criminals lived their lives in a state of semi-fear, haunted by memories of the excruciating pain generated by our cortex-searers and imagination-burners.