Debatable Space (26 page)

The human intelligences controlling the DRs are crumbling. They cannot cope with the idea that an entire planet of human beings
can stand against them. They are stressed, and fazed, and totally fucked up by the endless self-sacrifice and heroism they
are encountering.

That aspect of my plan, the part I always doubted, is actually working. The spirit of the human population of Cambria has
collectively defied the robot oppression. Their sacrifice has bought us time, has sapped the enemy spirit, has undermined
their confidence and self-belief.

These killer robots are not, in fact, all-powerful gods. They are inhabited by the minds of spoiled and pampered Earth system
dwellers. They are millionaires, sybarites, they have swimming pools in their houses and second homes in the Asteroid Belt.
They are white-collar workers, but such is the endless wealth of the Earth system that few of them need to work more than
ten or eleven hours a week. The rest of the time they can devote to self-indulgence, and mandatory DR duties.

These fucking gutless softies have ruled my planet for over a century. But at the first sign of opposition, they are crumbling.
We easily massacre the DRs at the end of the street. Before long, DRs start committing suicide in front of us – blowing off
their own heads in order to send their minds back to the comfort and total security of the Earth system.

It takes us forty-two hours to conquer the entire planet.

Three DRs appear in front of me and sing, “I can’t get no satisfaction” in beautiful three-part harmony. I’m freaked. I know
who Harry, Alliea, Jamie and Flanagan are. Lena is the only one of us unaccounted for. So which of the DRs is the real Lena?

“Who are you?” asks one of the DRs.

“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.”

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.

“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.