I explain it all to Lena. Then I open a briefcase. I take out a small cylinder and carefully open it. Inside is a single invisible microscopic robo-Bug. I transmit a mental signal: AWAKE.
Within seconds a black swarming mass has appeared on the table. A few seconds later, the black mass fills the air. I try to focus, and give the mental signal to self-destruct.
I cannot focus. My thoughts are a whirl. Lena’s face fills with horror as Doppelganger Bugs start to swarm around her. They rest on her skin, her hair, her nostrils. And still, I try and I try to focus, and I mentally utter the words that will cause them to be obliterated: SELF-DESTRUCT, PLEASE.
I feel nothing happening. Nothing… happening… My heart starts to spasm.
“Fucking do something!” she screams at me.
I cannot speak.
The Bugs have covered her entire body now, she is a black mummy with suppurating flesh. They are crowding into her mouth, they are overflowing from her ears. She tries to scream but the Bugs are blocking her throat. I panic, and try to pluck the Bugs from her mouth. But they merely swarm and enter my nostrils, and cover my body too. I feel Bugs forcing open my eyelids, gathering on my eyeballs. I try to brush them off me but they are legion, my body itches. My mind is in a state of total panic but I try again and again to focus…
… and focus…
… and focus…
Then the itching stops.
The Bugs aren’t moving. They are dead. I frantically wipe my eyes, my hands, sweeping myself clean. Clouds of dead Bugs fall to the ground. Lena chokes and vomits out vile black-specked vomit on to the floor. She is shuddering with fear, pounding her body with her hands to shake the Bugs free. I know that all her memories of being flayed are swamping her, and her skin still itches with the memory of the crawling evil microbes.
I shout at the room computer to switch on a blast of cold water. Lena and I stand beneath the cold water, feeling the dead Bugs being swooshed off our bodies. I pick dead Bugs out of her hair. They crumble in my hands.
“It’s worked.”
Her smile is wavery, and fearful, yet infinitely relieved.
Brandon
Flanagan has explained everything. We salute his genius, and his guile, and his relentless courage over many years. But we curse him, too, for not telling us what he’d done just a little sooner. While he was off fucking that fucking bitch, we were all steeped in total despair, expecting the imminent end of humanity.
Bastard. He likes his little joke.
We’ve boarded the Kornbluth Beacon, and found the eerie residue of the crew, eaten and reduced to slime. The crackling sound underfoot is the only residue we find of the dead robo-Bugs. We fumigate the ships, and send the slime and the crackle out into the emptiness of space. We surmise that the same thing has happened all across the Universe: the Bugs have self-destructed following Flanagan’s signal.
Flanagan is utterly confident that his plan has worked. The Beacons are gone, the robo-Bugs are gone, and humanity is saved.
And so we savour our triumph, the salvation of the entire human race. Except… except…
Except, in fact, victory feels like shit. My many appalling and traumatising defeats have been so much more enjoyable.
And I also Why does it feel so bad!! Why…
We had a huge party. It was magnificent but…
Fuck!
I feel so alone.
This is great. It’s everything I ever dreamed of. But…
It’s like a great big knife coming from the skies and cutting the connection between your right cerebral hemisphere and your left cerebral hemisphere. That’s how it feels. To me. How does it feel? To you?
Flanagan tries to butter me up at the celebration party. “I should have told you, Brandon,” he says, “what my plans were. I trust you so much…”
I don’t fucking care. Yeah yeah yeah, future of humanity, yeah yeah yeah. So fucking what?
Because the real tragedy of what has happened is this:
The Universal Web is no more.
The instantaneous network of communication between the three thousand or so inhabited planets is gone. The effortless and immediate access to the music charts, the books charts, the reviews, the gossip columns, it’s all gone. No more Earth TV. No more of the shows that I have loved so much – Penny for Your Thoughts, Enemies in Love, The Last Holocaust, Life in Hell, Death Island, Beelzebub and Trish and a hundred others. Sol system drama and comedy is without a shadow of doubt the best in inhabited space. And, despite all the horrors and the persecutions and the genocide and the rapes and the deaths of small infants caused by Sol system’s corrupt regime… I will miss those shows. How could I not? I will now have to wait a hundred and fifty years for the next episode of any one of those TV programmes. And so I will never again be current. I am backwatered.
Which doesn’t matter of course. The most important thing is that we have liberated humanity.
The hell it doesn’t matter!
What will Diane say, when she learns that Roger has had a sex change during his time in therapy for paedophiliac offences, in Roger and Diane? I have to know. I cannot wait a hundred and fifty years to find out. How will those two gay restaurateurs in Amyville cope when they have to share a raft across a whirlpool with a former Las Vegas World Champion Wrestler? I have to see it! I ache with anticipation of experiencing the embarrassment and absurdity of it all .
My brain is going to shrivel too. What are the latest developments in multi-dimensional superstring theory? Is it really the case that each one of us carries a million universes with us in every particle of skin? Is that an exaggeration? A solecism? A mathematical cul de sac? I absolutely damn well have to know!
But I cannot know. Not for a century and a half, at the very least. At one stroke, humanity has been parochialised. I can no longer send emails or vidmessages to friends who live hundreds of light-years away from me. I have no further access to the seething hubbub of ideas that makes the Universal Web the greatest scientific forum known to man.
I am an island. We are all islands. Much has been gained – but something has been lost.
I mourn the something. It matters to me. I regret none of what we have done – but I know that I regret the consequence.
I am alone.
Flanagan
“I am leaving,” Alby tells me.
“Why?”
“Your work issss done. You will now decline and die. Your adventuring dayssss are over.”
“Not necessarily.”
Alby considers my statement.
“One lasssst adventure, Captain Flanagan?”
“One lasssst adventure,” I tell him, in gentle mimicry.
There is a long, flickering silence.
“Then, with your permissssion, I shall sssstay and watch…!”
Harry
Kalen is brushing my fur. She yanks and tugs at the knots, and in a series of long gentle sweeps, she turns my angry Loper mane into a smooth silky flow.
“What will you do?” she asks.
“Settle on Kornbluth, I suppose. The DRs are all deactivated. The humans will need help getting used to life without the Earth Beacon. I could help in that.”
“I thought I might go home.”
“To your home planet? Persia?”
“I need to spend more time with my people.”
“Your people are scattered through space. Besides, you aren’t sociable.”
“They are my people!”
“Cat people hate other cat people. It’s a well-known fact.”
“Except when we’re in heat.”
“You’re lucky. You can easily pass for pure human.”
“Why would I want to?”
“Fair point.”
“Just because I haven’t got fur and a tail like you. Doesn’t make me one of them.”
“Hey, don’t be racist.”
“I can smell the desire on you.”
“Can you?”
“Pure humans can’t
smell emotion as we do. They exist flatly. They can’t smell, they can’t even see the future.”
“You can see the future?”
“I can see a future.”
“Does it involve me?”
“Intimately.”
“Are you in heat?”
“No. But I’m not a slave to my biology.”
“Ah. Right. You realise I may scratch?”
“If you scratch, I’ll bite.”
“Brush a bit lower.”
“Like this?”
“Now stroke my fur.”
“Like this?”
“Like that.”
“This bit isn’t furry.”
“Oh that’s nice. Oh! Oh yes! Now, let me stroke you.”
She unzips. I touch her.
“Ah! Ah! Ah!”
“Is that good?”
Kalen
Miaow.
Lena
I am wallowing in self-pity and rage. He sees my expression, and smiles his superior, arrogant smile.
“Why the sour face?” Flanagan asks me.
“I’ve just been thinking back,” I say. “On our time together. All the lies you’ve told. You’ve kept so much from me.”
“It was the only way.”
“We were meant to be working together. I was your leader.”
“Of course.”
I glare at him, angrily. “You’re a lying bastard manipulator. I was never your leader,” I tell him.
“No.”
“That was a sop. To keep me happy. I gave orders to the pirate crew. You gave the real orders when my back was turned.”
“Yup.”
“You’ve played me for a fool.”
“Pretty well.”
“And the sex?”
“What about the sex?”
“Was that another sop?”
“It would have been tactless to say no to you. But hey, I enjoyed it.”
“You ‘enjoyed’ it. Ah.”
“Yup. It was great.”
“It was ‘great’. Faint praise.”
“It was fabulous, Lena.” He smiles at me. In his roguish way.
I slip off my dress. I stand before him naked. I can see the gleam in his eyes. I do have some effect on him. He reaches out and tries to touch me, but I won’t let him. I gesture for him to undress and he does.
We stand, a few feet apart, both naked. He is erect. I am magnificent. But I see a faint trembling whisper on his lips. He is already thinking ahead to what he is going to do after he’s fucked me.
I hit him in the chest. His heart stops.
Flanagan gurgles and sinks to his knees. I stare into his eyes and see fear and longing and hate.
I strike him again and his heart restarts. Then I mount him.
We fuck. He is full of the crazed frenzy that is so typical of those who have died and been brought back to life. He is a man possessed, a man redeemed.
Afterwards, he trembles in my arms, but I keep my fingers on his manhood. Every time I squeeze he has another orgasm. He has no idea how I am doing this and it makes him fearful.
“How was it?” I ask.
“So so,” he tells me. But his voice is trembling.
“Flanagan, I think I love you.”
“I doubt that,” he says. He looks faintly shifty.
I touch him, he orgasms.
“Flanagan, I love you.”
“So you said,” he replies, coolly.
I touch him, he orgasms.
“Flanagan, I love you,” I tell him, in tones of honey mixed with bile.
“I fucking love you too!” he screams. And orgasms again, and again, and again.
I roll off him. He’s lying of course. But mission accomplished; I’ve bent him to my will.
I get up and dress.
“You can stay a while if you like,” he murmurs. His bare chest is ripped raw where I scratched him with my nails.
I leave.
Flanagan
The citizens of Kornbluth welcome us as their saviours. They have a parade that spans several hundred miles, with banners reading “Freedom!” and “A New Start!” It’s highly flattering.
I know that all across the Universe similar scenes must be taking place. But I long to know for certain. Like Brandon, I miss the Universal Web. I miss the community of humankind.
The Kornbluthians stage the greatest street party ever known. All across the planet, bands play and people dance. Huge video screens project the images of what is happening in other cities, as we dance in the main square of Gladiatorville.
These people are strangers to me. This is not my home. I long to go back to Cambria.
“Homesick, Cap’n?” Kalen asks.
“Yeah. You too?”
“I’m over it. I’m planning to roam a little. Travel from star to star. Maybe take some seeds and frozen sperm, see what happens.”
“You’re going to find and settle your own planet?”
“Me and Harry.”
“What?”
“You heard.”
“You’re miscegenating?”
“Is that what they call it in your neck of the woods?”
“I’m pleased for you.”
“Good luck in Cambria.”
“I’m not going to Cambria.”
“Where then?”
I pause.
“Earth.”
Lena
The Captain has briefed his crew, and they are ranged before me, confronting me.
“I can’t do it,” I tell them.
“You must,” says Kalen.
“You have to,” says Brandon.
“Please, for me,” says Flanagan.
“Just do it, bitch,” says Jamie.
“I don’t see the need. You’ve saved humanity.”
“You know what will happen on Earth.”
“I don’t know for certain.”
I’m lying. I do know. At the moment, Earth is a paradise; all its people are free, sustained by the slave labour on other planets.
But once Earth is isolated again… What will the Corporation do then?
“They’ll fuck it up,” says Jamie.
“It’ll be, yeah,” says Brandon.
“Shit,” adds Jamie.
“Real shit,” Brandon adds.
“It’s true,” Kalen chips in.
“Human nature.”
“What a bummer.”
“Some people need someone to oppress. It’s the way of the Universe. Unless…”
“It’ll take a brave person. Someone, you know…”
“Heroic. A heroine. You could be…”
“Shut the fuck up,” I snarl. But the flattery does its job.
Because I know exactly what my son will do. He will not surrender his power, he will not in any way compromise. Instead, he will authorise a new war. He will build starships to go back out into space and rebuild Beacons. And if necessary, he will enslave half of Earth humanity in order to do that.
And so, if we do not act, then in forty or fifty years the Corporation’s warships will reach the edges of inhabited space. Within two hundred years they will be at Kornbluth. And this time, they will be unbeatable. Slavery will return. We will, once again, be two human races: the Have Everythings, and the Trodden Underfoots.
I know what must be done.
We have to kill the Cheo. We have to destroy the Corporation. We have to conquer Earth.
“It can’t be done. All the Beacons are destroyed,” I tell them. “There’s no way for us to connect with Earth, or to mind-travel there, without a Quantum Beacon.”
“There is a way.”
“The Beacons are all destroyed!” I shout at him.
“All but one.”
With waves of horror, I realise that all along Flanagan has known of my secret power and status.
“You,” Flanagan says.
“Me?”
“You. You are a Beacon.”
He has figured it out. Every other member of the pirate
crew has a brain microchip with a roaming facility which connects it to the nearest remote computer – whether it’s on the pirate ship, on the nearest planet, or even on one of the interstellar-space-travelling computers which can be found from time to time.
But I am unique in that I have exclusive and individual use of one computer, which I can access instantaneously wherever I am. And that computer is on Earth. This was my parting gift from my son, the Cheo: a brain implant that allows me instant access to everything that is happening or has happened anywhere in the inhabited Universe, via a massively powerful remote computer on Earth.
And, of course, such a connection is possible because the microchip implant includes a Quantum Beacon.
“Everyone assumes the Beacons must be large,” Flanagan says, calmly.
“Not so,” says Jamie.
“They’re small. Itsy.”
“Bitsy.”
“Quantum-sized small!”
“It’s the ships which house the Beacons which are large,” Flanagan says. “The Beacons are, well, infinitesimal. You have a Quantum Beacon in your brain, Lena. That’s how you know so much. You are our only link to Earth.”
“You can’t ask me to kill my own son,” I whisper.
“Lena, you have to. It “s the only way.”
He’s right, I know. Lena, be careful.
Tinbrain, be quiet. I have need of you. Consider this an order. What is your order, Lena? Lena?
Help me go to war.
Lena
My remote computer goes to work. It is networked with every other computer on Earth and on the Dyson Jewels. It can access any workplace, any factory.
My computer accesses the mainframe computer on a space factory in orbit near Venus. It issues it with a series of specifications and instructions. Moulding presses are created and hot bioplastic is poured in. Humanoid shapes are created, and modified, and sculpted. Robotic brains are built and installed, tailor-made to be operated by human minds.
The robots are strong, and can breathe in airless space. And their armoured carcasses have only a few weak points that can be damaged by explosive bullets or laser blasts.
Debatable Space Page 33