Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

I was off-planet at the time, doing a gig on a space station in orbit around Pixar’s sun. But my wife Janet, and my son Adam, and my daughters Claire and Adelaide were all on the planet. They were, I guess, obliterated within the first ten minutes. I can only hope they didn’t know what was happening to them.

And when I heard the news, I literally couldn’t believe it. I became almost psychotic in my scepticism, convinced the Universe was playing a practical joke on me. Then I replayed the vid footage and I wept. An entire world died… and all of my family died with them!

After this appalling catastrophe, there was mourning throughout the inhabited universe. Emails of condolence came from the remotest planets in the human domain, and the Government of Earth declared a day of mourning, in respect and homage to the dear departed.

Then the conspiracy theorists started up. They whined and whinged and sent hysterical and fantastical texts and emails across the galaxy, in their usual (hysterical, fantastical!) fashion. According to these nutsos, the asteroid strike had been predicted decades before. But the Galactic Corporation decided to let it happen in order to give Pixar a more interesting and mountainous geography.

And thus, according to these insane, delusional conspiracy theorists, the powers that be knowingly allowed tens of millions of humans to die in order to landscape a planet.

All sensible folk scoffed at these wild allegations. The Cheo himself gave an interview and carefully disproved every one of the claims made against his administration. He was astonishingly persuasive and charismatic, and his approval ratings soared.

But I believed every word. I knew, from my own experiences as a child on Cambria, that there is literally no limit to the evil of the bureaucrats who run the Corporation. They are heartless, ruthless, entirely without remorse or humanity. They are infinitely blessed, infinitely powerful, but they are also savage, bloodthirsty, murdering, raping, greedy, profit-drenched, psychopathic monsters.

No limit whatsoever.

And so I watched the news coverage intently as, after the asteroid struck, the Galactic Corporation began its rescue operation. Survivors of the collision were forced to burn their dead for fertiliser. Galactic Corporation engineers moved in to reshape the planet as a global resort. The ice caps were melted to create a warm brilliant sea. Continents were broken up into islands with picturesque coastlines. The prevailing Pixar sentient species (a two-headed earthworm) was exterminated, and replaced with new species including colourful flying parrots, dolphins, herds of Purr (catlike herbivores) and genetically engineered clawless koalas from old Terra.

I left Pixar, and I played a gig on a space liner in a neighbouring solar system. My Spanish guitar with hip-hop rhythms was an unqualified success. I sang a blues song too, about an asteroid miner who lost his heart, his lungs, his liver, all four limbs, his ears and his eyes in a series of terrible accidents, replacing them in turn with ramshackle and fairly unreliable prosthetic equivalents, and whose sad lament was entitled “ At Least I’ve Still Got My Own Balls ”.

I went down a storm, but I couldn’t help feeling I was in the wrong line of work. After all the horror and injustice I had experienced in my childhood, after the trauma of losing my wife and family in what was meant to be one of the civilised parts of human space, I was still trying to make a living as a rock star…?

So I loaded up the ship’s lifeboat with a year’s supply of stolen vintage wine, and made my escape. I was an outlaw from that day on.

And now, I’m Captain of a pirate crew.

Rob was an unlicensed boxer, I was his manager, as well as his lover, as well as his wife.

They were scary days. Boxing was a capital crime, thanks to the Cheo’s latest edict. I guess he was afraid that the enslaved masses of the Universe would be driven into revolution and dissent at the sight of two men dancing around a ring hitting clumps out of each other.

We travelled from planet to planet, and Rob would fight all challengers. He would fight two men in a single ring. He would fight women, he would even box with cyborgs, and beat them. He had an astonishing capacity to take physical punishment coupled with natural speed and grace and a remarkably fluid upper body. He was, some argue, one of the greatest boxers there has ever been.

His greatest fight was against Eduardo Munoz. Rob was already an acknowledged champion at the cruiserweight level, but Munoz was a superheavyweight, a bruiser, a sheer block of human rock with the power of pistons in his arms. In training sessions, Munoz would pound the heavy bag so hard that the dents could not be removed. He would practise punching on concrete walls. He routinely killed sparring partners, and only regular bribes prevented him from being charged with murder.

But Rob stepped up a weight division, bulked up, and fought like an angel. He slipped in and slipped out, ducked under Munoz’s sledgehammer blows, and threw so many powerful punches that the computer checker eventually lost count. Munoz had the heart and the wind cut out of him by Rob’s forensic dissection. By the end of fifteen rounds, Munoz could not raise his arms. So Rob pelted him with a thousand relentless punches before the final bell rang.

The fight went to Munoz. The fix was in. The crowd was in uproar. But Rob calmly challenged Munoz to an instant rematch. The battered champion had enough pride to accept the challenge. The two men stood in the ring. Rob lowered his guard. He beckoned Munoz on, inviting him to give his best shot. So Munoz threw his best punch. Rob took it head-on, without any attempt to duck. He absorbed the blow, letting the kinetic energy flow through his head and torso and legs into the canvas. And he rocked, and he swayed, but he did not fall.

Then Rob unleashed his counterpunch. He hit Munoz on the jaw, and the champion literally flew through the air, over the ropes, and landed on the three corrupt fight scorers. Two of them died, one of them was knocked unconscious. The referee – the only conscious member of the adjudication team – declared the fight in favour of Rob. We got a purse of $11 million. But we had to flee that night, pursued by angry gangsters.

Ah, what glorious days… Ironically, I had never liked boxing before meeting Rob. But I came to love the sport for its speed and beauty and camaraderie, and for the fact it breached the ultimate taboo. Brain damage. Any other extreme sport – sky diving, sabre fighting, alligator wrestling – offered dangers and injuries that could easily be remedied by a trip to the organ bank. But a single powerful punch could cause irreversible brain damage that couldn’t be patched up without altering the psyche, or losing whole batches of memories.

That was the buzz. Risk everything. Live for the moment.

At least, that was the appeal for me. For Rob, it was more basic; he simply loved the sport. He was a natural athlete, he trained remorselessly. He trained with hunting dogs, running with them over rugged terrain. He raced horses. He pulled tractors with ropes to improve his upper-body strength; he once swam an entire ocean to improve his stamina. And his reflexes were superior to those of the average spacejet pilot.

And boy, we made poetry in bed. Rob was the master of tantric, soul-shaking, buttock-trembling fucks. I was young, passionate, blonde then, and I had orgasms like supernovae. I will miss that. I know I’ll never feel such physical joy again.

We toured the outer galaxies with our boxing show. Rob would challenge space miners and martial artists, and they would fight five or six hours at a time, without gloves or padding, until they were covered in blood and blisters. Rob never lost.