Debatable Space Read online

  “Neither do you.”

  “I don’t kill people.”

  “No, but your people kill people. They slaughter entire races. They incinerate planets. They enslave large sections of humanity.”

  “Oh, this is just socialist rant.”

  “Your son presides over the most evil dictatorship in human history.”

  “That’s an appalling exaggeration.”

  “He’s a monster.”

  She pauses, momentarily flustered. Then she says: “I’m his mother, not his keeper.” It sounds lame, and she can’t help wincing at her own words.

  “Do you deny the internment without trial?” I say angrily. “The torture and humiliation of innocent people singled out because of their race and creed? Do you deny the Cheo’s government is corrupt, exploitative and ruthless?”

  “I deny none of this! But it’s not for me to defend my son.”

  “But he’s your son. You could at least…”

  “What? Tell him off?”

  I am seized with an appalling homicidal rage, and I rein myself in. Not now, not here, not like this… I force a smile. Then, in icily measured tones I tell her: “My people have suffered for centuries. But we will endure and we will survive and we will find our Promised Land.”

  She blinks for a few moments.

  “You’re a Christian?” she asks me.

  “I’m a Humanist Atheist,” I reply. “But I still believe in the possibility of a better future.”

  “You’re full of lies,” she snarls. “You’re just a very successful thief. I don’t buy this freedom-fighter bullshit.”

  “I can be both! A thief and a champion of justice!”

  “A butcher, and a beheader of innocents!”

  “In war such things must happen!”

  “In peace, such things must happen too. That is why my son is so severe!”

  “The Cheo is an animal.”

  “He is a leader. He leads. The universe of humanity follows. His way is brutal, yes. But given the restrictions imposed by the vast distances of space, and the fragmented and self-destructive nature of humankind, and, and, and… the xenobiological threats which jeopardise our very survival – how could it be otherwise…?”

  Our angry words hang in the air, like mist on a summer’s morning.

  “I’ve enjoyed this quarrel.”

  “So have I.”

  “Even though you’re wrong.”

  “Oh fuck off!”

  “Fuck off yourself, bitch!!!!”

  “You blame me for everything.” Suddenly, the ice maiden Lena is in tears. “Why is that? Why am I always blamed for everything?”

  “You gave birth to a monster. For that, you stand condemned.”

  Flanagan

  My home planet of Cambria is a warm and green and beautiful land. Originally, it had been an arid ball with a high oxygen content and vast reserves of frozen water. But accelerated terraforming melted the water, mixed the oxygen with carbon dioxide, and liberated the vast fertility of the lands. Low rolling hills cover most of my homeland, interwoven with a complex latticework of rivers and lakes. There are no seas, no oceans, just fertile land and rich Earth-born vegetation.

  The factories of Cambria are contained underground, in vast caverns transformed into slave repositories and workplaces. The masters of the planet – the DRs – inhabit the green and fertile land of Cambria. And the humans live beneath the earth, in flickering artificial semi-light. And that is where I lived, as a child, and where I worked too.

  Our work was skilled. We created hand-carved furniture for the DRs to enjoy. We wove clothes for the DRs to wear. And we formed vast conveyor lines of people to assemble DR artefacts – music players, cars, airplanes, flyboards, personal computers and mobile phones. The components were all precision-created by machines which we serviced and tended. But it was cheaper and easier for humans to slot the individual components together into their wholes, than to build a machine to do it.

  My father was a Surface Human, and every day he joined an army of workers who trooped up to the surface to maintain the perfect idyll that was Cambria. Some were gardeners, some pruned trees, some tended and fed the wild animals. There were vast vineyards covering Cambria, and some workers had the vital task of picking these grapes and treading them in the old-fashioned way with their feet to turn the grape juice into wine. Other humans tended the olive trees, the apple and orange trees, the potato fields. Some grew marrows and courgettes. Some created exotic hybrid fruit and vegetables.

  Some, the privileged few, were Chefs, responsible for cooking and preparing by hand magnificent meals for the frequent DR banquets. Some were Waiters, some were Bartenders. But every night, the Surface Humans retired to their underground cavern homes, where they rejoined their families and participated in the human community we called True Cambria.

  It wasn’t a bad life, by and large. The underground caverns were a natural formation, caused by extreme volcanic action, and they formed a subterranean subworld that stretched beneath the entire planet. The caverns were often vast, and the rock formations were extraordinary. This was my playground as a child. We played hide and seek, we played football, we swam in underground lakes. Children were never taken to the surface, so we never knew what we were missing. But I often think that given a choice between an underground cave and a field in sunlight – I would have chosen the cave. There was something magical and hidden about the world we lived in.

  And we had creature comforts too. We had food, plenty of water, alcohol when we needed it. We grew our own crops. We tended herds of animals. We wrote novels and poems and performed dramas for each other. But we had no knowledge of science, an entirely warped and blinkered version of our own history, and no concept of the methodology and principles of Quantum Beacon interstellar communication. Some intellectuals argued that, in fact, the community of Humans stretched across large portions of the Home Galaxy; and that humans were the dominant species in space. But we found that hard to believe. DRs were, to us, our gods.

  Yet as a child, I never fully understood what a DR really was. Not, that is, until my first Summer Fair.

  My sister Sheena and I were chosen to go together. She was sixteen, I was seventeen. She was a beautiful child; and I was a fit, handsome, arrogant young man. We felt proud to be selected for the Fair. I knew of course that sex was involved. But I was not a virgin, and neither was Sheena. We were prepared and willing and hungry for new experiences.

  I still remember the tingle of anticipation as the elevator took us up to the surface. We were given goggles to wear to protect us from the sunlight. But even so, when we took our first steps into the outside world, we were dazzled by the blazing light. Slowly our vision corrected itself, and we began, even through the goggles, to see the colours and richness of the land. The blazing yellow sun, the green fields, the brown bark of the trees, the pink and purple flowers, the blue lakes and streams and rivers.

  A city of tents had been created as the site for the annual Summer Fair festivities. Human dancers and singers performed on stage. There were fairground stalls, a rollercoaster, a man with knives showing off his throwing skills. Sheena and I paused to watch. Volunteers stepped forward from the audience to join in this amazing show. A beautiful young woman with blonde hair stood in front of a board, arms outstretched. And a drum rolled. And the knife thrower stood proud, and drew a knife from his belt, and held the blade in the fingers of his right hand. Then he threw.

  The silver blade arced through the air, not a breath emerged from the hushed crowd…

  And the knife landed safely in the board, next to her head. Then the next knife was thrown, and hit the board on the other side of her head. Another went under her arm. Another knife caught her hair and pinned it to the wood. And another knife flew… and another… splintering wood with terrifying force and missing flesh by centimetres. The knife thrower’s aim was remarkable; the girl was entirely unhurt. A cheer went up.

  I could smell toffee apples a
nd hot cider. I fet a surge of joy at the heat of the sun. I took off my goggles, and blinked, and by now was able to see in the clear daylight.

  Then a DR arrived, amazingly tall, powerfully muscled, silver-skinned, calmly authoritative. He took the knives from the knife man and prepared to show off his own skill.

  Within seconds six knives had been thrown, each of them perfectly on target. Three knives sank into the board just to the left of the young woman’s throat. Three went to the right of her throat. The knives were so close they grazed her skin. The woman shuddered, and laughed. “Someone else have a go!” she cried.

  But instead, the DR took up another set of knives. And, carelessly, casually, he threw. He put the first knife in the young woman’s left eye. The second went into her right eye. Then the third knife in her left breast, the fourth knife in her right breast. The fifth knife went in her mouth, buried to the hilt. Then the DR threw the sixth and final knife high up into the air, and walked away laughing. Five or six seconds later, the knife landed in the earth, shuddering from the impact.

  The woman was still alive, and groaning faintly. She was prised free, and she fell to the ground, bleeding. Spectators picked her up and laid her down. No one uttered a word of complaint. The woman bled to death, there on the grass. No one moved her body. Eventually, it almost seemed natural that there should be a dead blonde woman lying there, as the festival continued around her.

  I was beginning to get the idea. We, the humans, were not the audience for this day’s events. We were the show.

  A strange numbness came upon me at that moment. It wasn’t the horror of the woman’s death that appalled me. It was the crowd’s reaction. The murder was treated as normal, natural, not something to make a fuss about. As natural as flies shitting.

  As the day continued, I saw death, mutilation, rape, and a million horrors. The DRs, I discovered, differed in their preferences. Some liked sex, some preferred torture and murder. Sex was obviously the best available option for us humans, though that too carried risks. After a few hours, I was forced to sexually indulge a DR – and I was stunned and shocked when I saw the size and length of his silver-skinned penis. He obliged me to fellate him and I almost choked.

  Later, I was forced to have sex with my sister Sheena. I wanted to run or fight, but she begged me not to. Compliance seemed the safest option; we all clung to the hope that though some might die, the rest of us might survive.

  But not Sheena. After I tried, pathetically and unsuccessfully, to fuck her, she was beaten to death in front of me. That is perhaps, in the course of my entire life, my darkest memory. As she died, she whispered to me, “Good luck.” As she lay dying, she willed for me to live.

  My luck was in fact good. I was handsome, but not handsome enough. Striking, but not sublime. The best and most beautiful of my playfellows ended up dead or mutilated at the end of this week-long festival. I survived, scared and horrified, but with my strength and body intact.

  And, in the months that followed, I wondered what would happen if we fought back? There were millions upon millions of humans living in the caverns. And yet the best estimates were that there were no more than half a million DRs in all. Could we storm them? Fight them?

  This is when I began to seriously study the nature of our master race. I read stories of human rebellions on Cambria, all of which were easily crushed. I learned the origin of the DRs, and the reason for their effortless superiority.

  And I learned that the men and women who murdered and violated my sister and so many of my friends could not ever be killed by me. I could not take revenge, I could not hurt them.

  Because those men and women did not inhabit my planet. They lived far far away, many thousands of millions of miles away, on Earth or one of its neighbouring planets.

  And the creatures we believed to be our masters, the DRs, were merely artefacts – robot bodies of limited sentience which were controlled remotely by the men and women on Earth at their computer consoles.

  The DRs – Doppelganger Robots – are built out of pseudoflesh synthetic substances, and skilfully configured so that their skin and bodies are sensitive to taste, smell, touch and pain. But their bodies are no more than receptacles for sensation. Their minds are those of Earth humans wearing a virtual helmet with hands wrapped in metal gloves, able to remotely control their robot bodies and feel what they do, see what they see.

  In default settings the DRs’ robot intelligence can perform basic functions such as issuing orders, monitoring the work done by humans, and maintaining economic and agricultural systems. As a result the planet can function smoothly without the presence of the controlling Earth human intellects. Most DRs are in fact only inhabited by a human presence for four or six hours a day. Some are just weekend presences; others use their DRs as holiday recreation. After a tiring week at the office a stressed Earth human executive can strap on his virtual helmet… and enter a whole new world.

  For the grim truth is that Cambria is not strictly speaking a colony for human beings. It was, and still is, a theme planet, on which Cambrians are bred for their entertainment value, and where bored Earth humans can fulfil their wildest fantasies. As DRs, they possess an all-powerful and perfect body, which can be male or female according to their whim of that day. They have grace, beauty, phenomenal sexual appetites, and they have access to fresh wine, sunshine, green fields, the best organic foods, slave chefs, and an endless supply of human beings to be raped or tortured or, in some cases, befriended.

  This is Cambria, my home planet. This is my history, my legacy.

  This is why hate defines me.

  This is why I am what I am. Michael Flanagan, citizen of Cambria, pirate chief.

  Lena

  I am surrounded by flame. It’s really quite eerie.

  Alby tries to be charming, and courteously insists on treating me as a guest rather than as a hostage. In reality, of course, I am not free to leave, and I live in constant fear. And he is, actually, let’s face it, remarkably dull. And pedantic. And over-knowledgeable. And pompous. And excessively flickery. And over-inclined to disagree with my opinions, even when I’m totally right.

  And yet, to be fair to this poor, socially dysfunctional, personality-challenged, abhorrently weird and alien flame monster, he does laugh at all my jokes. And there is also, I have to admit, though I hate to do so, something beguiling about this time we spend together. We dine, we converse, we reminisce, we have fierce debates about politics and art and television drama. We are like some old married couple settled in domesticity, while living in a space station that orbits a sun that is infested by sentient flames.

  My grandfather once showed me his first typewriter. It was an Olivetti, and you had to really bang the keys to get the little metal arms to fly up and hit the paper and leave a mark. The ribbon was blue on top and red on the bottom; if you were technologically competent enough, you could swap from blue ribbon to red ribbon and have a multi-coloured text. Lord only knows why. Oh, and yes, I remember the way you corrected mistakes! If you wanted to delete something you literally painted the page with white goo, then let it dry, then typed over it. Or you stuck a little piece of white paper over the typing paper and tapped the same key as the letter you wanted to delete, so that the letter was replaced by a white replica which was the same colour as the typing paper, and hence, invisible. [God, that’s a bit hard to follow. And I worry my style is too informal – can you amend that last paragraph, deleting all the “yous” and substituting “ones”?]

  [No, on second thoughts, don’t bother, it looks more spontaneous if I leave in the occasional grammatical solecism, don’t you think?] I think that you…

  Hush, you mar my flow; as I was saying: That machine, my grandfather’s manual typewriter with its blue and red ribbon, is a vivid memory from my childhood that is seared into my brain. It was cutting-edge technology then. Now, I have a computer chip in my brain, and I am talking to a fire.

  And the mystery is, why it doesn’t all feel strange
r? How do we come to take these things for granted? For tens of thousands of years human beings whittled tools and farmed soil and ate animals. And now there are people who have themselves bioengineered so that their excrement emerges from their anus ready-wrapped in polythene. Such people have achieved the ultimate in human evolution; their shit does not stink.

  How can I possibly stay sane, knowing a thing like that?

  But, I suppose, the hardest thing to bear is when remarkable things don’t happen. If you are, for instance, a prehistoric human tending your field and you are never visited by beings from outer space, and never have a vision of a god, and are incapable of telepathy or telekinesis, and cannot see ghosts, and nothing ever changes for you, day after day after day… then that really would be strange. A life without magic; a life without wonder.

  And, I must confess, a really odd thing has happened to me. I have become reconciled to my life of imprisonment. I have become used to being a bargaining chip. And I am confident that my beloved son Peter will pay the ransom and save his mother from this living Hell.

  So life is good.

  I sit down to dinner one night. As always, Alby sits with me, chatting, keeping me company. He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t drink, but as a dinner companion, I’ve had much worse.

  Then the door opens and a woman walks in. She glides calmly forward, sits down, picks up my glass of wine and drinks from it. Then she looks at me.

  I reach out. And I touch her face. I touch her breasts. I put my fingers in her mouth. She accepts all this. She smiles. “Will I do?” she asks Alby. He flickers, and I can sense his admiration, his pride, at the sight of this strikingly beautiful woman. But I, I am lost for words.

  For she is me. The woman is me.

  Flanagan

  I am training with Alliea and Brandon. I do a star jump, touch the ceiling, Alliea fires a stun gun which hits me in the chest, and I fall like a stone, but recover and land on my feet. And then I do another star jump.