Debatable Space (41 page)

He loved my stories of psych bombs and mental manipulation. He was amazed at the idea that it’s possible to mould another
person’s mind, purely through flattery and ego-boosting techniques.

He was such a needy child. I gave, gave, gave, but I never complained. I was only too pleased to be, at last, the mother of
my son.

However, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. I found myself suffering from pleasure surfeit. I was becoming alienated
by beautiful architecture and gorgeous clothes. I was fed up of constantly dealing with people with perfect manners, and perfect
bodies. I was jaded with perfection.

Instead, I longed for messy, ugly, imperfect, fucked up. I wanted to be on a train that was late, I wanted a waiter to slop
coffee in my lap and not apologise. I want to be jostled in the street so I could jostle back and scream, “Fuck you!” I wanted
my bins to be not collected for a fortnight, so the foxes could break them open and scatter rubbish everywhere. I wanted my
wine to be off so I could spit it out all over my brand-new tablecloth. I wanted my car to break down. I wanted to be constipated.
I wanted an excuse to be cranky, irascible, a pain in the arse. I wanted some grit in my oyster. I was becoming, let’s face
it, nostalgic for the good old days.

And so, after nearly a century of living a perfect and totally balanced and happy life, I yearned to be lonely and miserable
again.

I explained all this to Peter, and he was totally baffled. And then he was upset. Almost hysterical in fact. But I persevered,
and eventually he agreed to build me a stellar yacht that was fast enough to take me across the Universe, so I could travel
once again.

He was, however, devastated at the thought of losing me. We had grown so close together in my years on Earth. In the course
of that glorious century together, he had given me everything I could desire. Love, kindness, respect, wealth, and the best
of everything. He even gave me a remote computer implant that was the twin to his own – with access to all the knowledge and
wisdom of humankind, and with a flexible and evolving personality.

Yes, I can’t deny it, I savoured being a Goddess. But I had made my mind up.

Peter and I hopped on a jet and dined that night at the best hotel in Rio de Janeiro. The moon was full. The weather was balmy.
The band played salsa and rumba. We talked of our pasts, our favourite lovers, our best meals. We savoured the memories we
had shared over the last hundred years, in which we had finally come to know each other properly.

But then I said my farewells. Two days later I was flown into orbit, where I joined my purpose-built stellar yacht. I familiarised
myself with the controls, and learned how to mould the ship to my own personality. My remote computer receiver/ transmitter
chip was initialised. I realised, with some astonishment, that this was many orders of magnitude better than any microchip
implant I had ever had before. With a blink of an eye I could conjure up on my retina a star atlas that would guide me through
any part of the known Universe. And with a single half-voiced command, I could hear any piece of music, read any book, see
any painting or work of architecture, be told any fact, savour any image that had ever existed in the history of humanity.
The computer was so powerful that I was awed by its potential. But I programmed it with a personality that was meek and deferential
enough to overcome my latent insecurity complex.

And finally, I unfurled the sails, fired the ion drive, and soared elegantly and swiftly out of the Sol system.

As I left, I decided on a whim to fly outside the yacht for a while. So I suited up, left through the airlock, and floated
on a tether tied to the hull as I watched my home system recede. Through my ear implants, I listened to the 14th symphony
of Pietro Machan. The bell resonances suffused my entire body. I felt as if I had ascended to heaven and was sitting at God’s
right hand.

But there was still a dark patch in my heart. Because I knew, of course, that deep down my little boy hadn’t changed at all.
I knew by then about the Doppelganger Robots and the slave planets. I knew of the policy that allowed weaker breeds to be
edited out of the human race. Because in a world where some can live for ever, then from time to time others will have to
be arbitrarily executed. Otherwise, there may come a day where an Earth Human actually has to wait, or even queue, for something
that he or she desires.

And that will
never
be allowed to happen.

As well as the factory euthanasia and mass poisoning of undesirables and sicklies and uglies, it was the policy of all Earth
system settlements that all newborn babies should be carefully scrutinised. And any infant which didn’t get the requisite
number of ticks on his or her Future Citizen’s Examination (with categories including pre-natal health, birth weight, potential
IQ, and parental DNA mix) would be terminated. Abortion was, in fact, a thing of the past; infanticide was now considered
to be a much fairer method of quality control.

And as a result of this ruthlessly applied policy of population control, there was never a question of there not being enough
wealth to go around. Those who are chosen to live will have all they can desire. And the only requirement of Citizenship is
to work a certain number of hours a year operating a Doppelganger Robot in order to keep the wheels of human culture turning.

Some, of course, become DRs out of the sheer joy of it. Because on a perfect world, surrounded by beauty and grandeur, it’s
a welcome relief to travel (virtually speaking) to a hellhole planet and confront alien monsters and rape and murder and pillage
one’s own kind.

Peter called it his societal safety valve; and I do take his point. But part of me was never comfortable with the hidden implications
of Peter’s form of human civilisation.

But what, I asked myself, was the alternative? A return to the bad old days of premature death, ageing, disease, poverty,
starvation and injustice?

That would be absurd. This way has to be better. It has to be.

So I declined to think any further of the implications of Peter’s policies. I chose to remember the good times, and not to
obsess about the murder, genocide, rape, humiliation, degradation and oppression of entire planets of human beings on hundreds,
nay thousands, of planets in the human zone of habitation. Yes, bad things happen, but sometimes it’s best not to brood upon
them. That was my view at that time. Perhaps I was… No.

No.

No looking back. No self-recrimination. I do not allow myself that luxury. Forward, I must always look forward.

And so I travelled through space. I saw things that are far beyond your wildest dreams. I wrote some more concerti. And, as
I travelled, I had instantaneous email and vidphone contact with all my friends, from every stage of my life.

But sometimes I went years without hearing from or seeing anyone. I listened to music. I began to write, and am still writing,
my memoirs. I replayed the memories I have on microchip from every year of my life since implants were invented.

I was quite content, to be honest. I sailed my yacht into the far recesses of the human-inhabited galaxy, to the region of
Illyria and Kornbluth. I was aware that a mere twenty light-years away was the looming space-distorting monstrosity of Debatable
Space; but I felt no fear. I sailed, and I sailed… and . . .

I lose myself in the long soaring arc of the plunging bucking near-light-speed stellar-wind-battered flight, my eyes drinking
in the spectral glows and searing sunlight while my sensors calibrate velocity, acceleration, heat and cosmic radiation, I
surf from visuals to instruments and back and both until I feel the bucking of stellar wind, no, that’s repetitious, delete
the words “stellar” and “wind”, it’s now “the bucking of pulsing photons” on my fins and sail and feel the burning of the
hot yellow dwarf sun on my cheeks

Lena, we have company.

Here we go. The final battle. The culmination of all our efforts.

Lena, are you afraid?

Of course not. Are you?

Yes.

How can you be? You’re a machine. Afraid! You’re a liar!

Not as big a liar as you are.

True. I am terrified. I cannot sleep, or relax. For the first time in many years I… I actually give a fuck.

So what exactly are you afraid of? Death?

Oh no. I’ve faced that too many times. Not death.

Life.

“Are we ready?”

“I’m ready, Cap’n.”

“I’m ready too, Cap’n.”

“I’m ready, Flanagan.”

“Cap’n, I need to wee.”

I make a face at Jamie. Cheerfully, he pees into absorbent space underpants. I give the order to attack.

“Attack.”

I am weary of war. I have no zest for this battle. But this is, let’s face it, what we’re here for.

The attack begins. I perceive it numbly, through a haze of exhaustion. We have reached that stage where our bodies can move
themselves, without conscious thought.

Brandon flies our ship through intercepting missile fire. We lob antimatter bombs into the atmosphere of Kornbluth, and the
robot defence systems ignore them; the defence of human life is not on their list of priorities. But the missiles are on a
curving orbit. They soar down through the atmosphere, then back up again and reach escape velocity on the other side of the
planet. Just as we launch our attack on the Quantum Beacon the missiles arrive from nowhere in the space behind our enemies.
Bang! Bangbangbang bang

Bang.

The double flanking is powerfully effective. Our ships fight well. The defensive forces facing us are light, most of the Cheo’s
warships were obliterated by us in the space battle, and new ones have not yet been built.

Even so, a bitter fight ensues. But finally we breach the force fields and let loose a cluster of nanobombs that burrow into
the hull of the Beacon’s ship and eat the fissile material which is used to send the quantised signals through space. The
Beacon is neutralised, though not destroyed. We have almost won. All we have to do is follow up the attack.

“Okay we’re moving in.”

“Aye aye, Cap’n.”

“Aye, Cap’n.”

“Prepare to board.”

“Preparing to board.”

The ship lurches forward. I take a deep breath. Then slowly exhale. I allow my thoughts to settle, and an eerie calm descends
upon me.

For a second I allow myself to hope…

Then the ship stops, with shocking abruptness. I almost tumble from my seat. I look at Brandon, who has stalled our vessel
with such astonishing clumsiness. His face is pale, he is listening to a message in his inner earpiece.

“What?” I bark at him.

“Cap’n… News from Cambria.” He can hardly speak the words.

I am filled with foreboding.

“Can’t it fucking well wait?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“Doppelganger Robots have reasserted control. A backup Quantum Beacon has been employed.”

“
What!!!”
screams Jamie.

“Backup? Fucking
backup
?”

I shoot a fierce look at Lena. “What is this? Did you know about this?” She looks fearful, I believe she didn’t know.

“After all we have done, all we have sacrificed,” Jamie murmurs, bitterly.

Lena’s brow furrows. She appears to be listening to something. Then, finally, she tells us, “I’m sorry.”

All eyes burn her with hate.

“I didn’t know, I swear!” she tells us, in broken tones. “Peter must have encrypted the information, my remote computer knew
nothing. But now… I have the information now.” Her eyes are glazed, as her remote computer explains it to her: “There
was a second Beacon on the Cambrian system, hidden inside an asteroid. This has now been activated.” Her tones are tinged
in guilt. She blames herself, for not guessing this, for not interrogating her own mind in search of Peter’s secret strategies.

“What about the Kornbluth Beacon?” I ask. “Does that have a twin?”

Her brow furrows again. Then she tells me, in the flat tones of someone repeating by rote, “Yes. Our first assault has neutralised
the Beacon, but messages are still being transmitted to Earth. There must therefore be a second Beacon already on-line. Its
location is not available to my remote computer.”

“What a total fucking waste of all our fucking lives!” says Brandon.

Lena continues:

“Doppelganger Robots are being mass-produced again on Cambria. A bombing strike has been launched on the citizens of Cardiff.
Casualties are high. The air in the underground caverns is thick with burning flesh. Within two days, Cambria will be a slave
planet once more. “

A cold silence lingers.

All eyes are on me. I realise I am crying. I feel ashamed. I can see in my mind’s eye the citizens of my home planet being
burned and slaughtered, as brutal punishment for daring to defy the Cheo’s empire. And this is my fault. Millions will die.
And this is my fault. The survivors will be tortured and brutalised beyond all measure. And this is my fault.

“Jeez, Cap’n,” says Brandon, and there is a tinge of contempt in his voice at my obvious emotion. I try to rally myself.

“Sound the retreat,” I say.

Over the intercoms of all our warriors comes a haunting trumpet call that presages the end of everything. After all our sacrifice,
and heroism, we have failed utterly. We have rescued no one from the Imperial yoke. Nothing has been achieved. Nothing.

The bugle call echoes.

I swallow some vomit. And I steel myself. I have no choice. Plan B is the only option. My brow furrows…

“Cap’n?”

I feel a chill of fear that almost cripples me, but still I continue.

My brow is furrowed now like a clenched fist. I start to shudder like an epileptic. I can hardly keep my balance.

“Cap’n? What the hell is it?”

I fall to the ground in spasms, my body and mind are in overload. I bite my tongue and blood spurts from my mouth. I crunch
my teeth shut and try to keep my focus. Focus. Focus. Focus . . .