The Complete Short Stories, Volume 2
Page 83
The planet’s mineral, energy and agricultural resources have been efficiently, and even ruthlessly, exploited. A simple but evidently attractive system of barter, based on the concept of money, facilitates the transfer of manufactured goods and services, and the surplus wealth generated has funded an ever-expanding science and technology. Space-flight, except in its most primitive forms, still lies beyond the abilities of these people, but they have harnessed the energy of the atom, deciphered the molecular codes that oversee their own reproduction, and seem well on the way to banishing disease and solving the mysteries of life and immortality.
At the same time, our researches have shown that despite these achievements the peoples of this planet have in other respects scarcely raised themselves above the lowest levels of barbarism. The enjoyment of pain and violence is as natural to them as the air they breathe. War above all is their most popular sport, in which rival populations, and frequently entire continents, attack each other with the most vicious and destructive weapons, regardless of the death and suffering that follow. These conflicts may last for years or decades. Nations nominally at peace devote a large proportion of their collective income to constructing arsenals of lethal weapons, and satisfy the appetites of their populations with a display of brutal entertainments in which violence, humiliation and murder are almost the sole ingredients.
Not surprisingly, our latest research confirms that the imminent threat to which their computers alerted us was in fact represented by the existence of these people. They constituted the danger that was about to overwhelm their planet, and it was to save themselves that the computer networks summoned us from the far side of the universe.
The deadline set by the computers, the crucial hour when one millennium gave way to another, perhaps explains the reason for their alarm. Given these people’s hunger for violence, it may be that they saw the birth of a new millennium as a licence for an even greater carnival of destruction. They waited at the threshold of space, a barbaric horde with the secret of immortality within their grasp, eager to play with their own psychopathology as the ultimate game.
The prospect of this virulent plague spreading across the universe must have prompted the planet’s computers to call a halt. But the ultimate mystery remains of where the inhabitants have disappeared. If they have been physically annihilated in an act of planetary hygiene there is no trace of the billions of corpses or of the vast necropolis needed to inter them.
A possible explanation occurs to us as we prepare to return to our home star. Driven by the need for a more lifelike replica of the scenes of carnage that most entertained them, the people of this unhappy world had invented an advanced and apparently interiorised version of their television screens, a virtual replica of reality in which they could act out their most deviant fantasies. These three-dimensional simulations were generated by their computers, and had reached a stage of development in the last years of the millennium in which the imitation of reality was more convincing than the original. It may even have become the new reality to the extent that their cities and highways, their fellow citizens and, ultimately, themselves seemed mere illusions by comparison with the electronically generated amusement park where they preferred to play. Here they could assume any identity, create and fulfil any desire, and explore the most deviant dreams.
But at some point in the new millennium they might well have decided to return to the world and test it against those dreams, ready to destroy it like a child bored with an unresponsive toy. Is it possible that the computers of this planet, having welcomed the population into this cave of illusion, then made a desperate decision and entombed them magnetically, translating them by some as yet undiscovered science into a memorised version of their physical selves? Once inside the cave, the door of virtual death was sealed and encrypted behind them, leaving the computers alone and safe at last.
If so, we arrived some moments too late. As we leave, the computers have calmed themselves, and are singing quietly in unison. Perhaps they miss their former companions, however brutish. Our concluding survey indicates that they have invented God, perhaps an idealised image of the race they entombed. As we set out into space we can hear them praying.
1992
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About the Author
J.G. BALLARD was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, where his father was a businessman. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ballard and his family were placed in a civilian prison camp. They returned to England in 1946. After two years at Cambridge, where he read medicine, Ballard worked as a copywriter and Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF. He started writing short stories in the late 1950s, while working on a scientific journal. His first major novel, The Drowned World, was published in 1962. His acclaimed novels include The Crystal World, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash (filmed by David Cronenberg), High-Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company, The Kindness of Women (the sequel to Empire of the Sun), Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and, most recently, Kingdom Come.
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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First published in Great Britain by Flamingo in 2001
This collection copyright © J.G. Ballard 2001
Most of the stories in this book appeared in the following smaller collections:
The Terminal Beach © J.G. Ballard 1964
The Disaster Area © J.G. Ballard 1967
The Day of Forever © J.G. Ballard 1967
The Atrocity Exhibition © J.G. Ballard 1969
Vermilion Sands © J.G. Ballard 1971
Low-Flying Aircraft © J.G. Ballard 1976
The Venus Hunters © J.G. Ballard 1980
Myths of the Near Future © J.G. Ballard 1982
War Fever © J.G. Ballard 1990
The following stories have not previously appeared in a collection of J.G. Ballard’s stories:
‘The Recognition’ © J.G. Ballard 1967
‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ © J.G. Ballard 1992
‘The Message from Mars’ © J.G. Ballard 1992
‘Report from an Obscure Planet’ © J.G. Ballard 1992
J.G. Ballard asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
This collection is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007245765
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2014 ISBN: 9780007513611
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