Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

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.