Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

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.

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 stranger? 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.