Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

“I know what you’re doing,” says Lena, with that faraway look in her eyes. Then she starts to smile. Then she gives me another kiss, a great big smacker this time, on the lips.

“Don’t distract him!” shouts Brandon with, I feel, a hint of jealousy. I’m beaming now, and bright red in the face. I look at the computer screen. “ACCESS DENIED” flashes up and I type in the override. I have a few seconds of pure genius.

Lena turns to the Captain. “This isn’t a suicide mission,” she says, marvelling. “You have a way out.”

“There’s always a way out,” says Flanagan.

“You can teleport? You can actually do that?”

“Not exactly,” says Flanagan.

“I created the program!” I tell her. “I’m a genius, I’m so clever! Munchie!”

The Captain gives me another chocolate bar. But I don’t touch it. Actually, I’m feeling a bit tired. I get that a lot these days. Mornings are okay, I always wake up with a spring in my step, and I love the way my mind hops and bounces around. I have the mental vigour of a ten-year-old, boing! boing!, my thoughts go so fast no oldie could ever keep up. Combined of course with the intellectual maturity of a man in his hundreds. Beat that, huh?

But the truth is, I’m starting to feel my age. I feel like Dr McCoy, in the original Star Trek, but stuck in this silly child’s body. I wish I were Jackie Chan, the 3D animated version. Then I’d be young for ever.

“Release the escape pod,” Flanagan says and our vessel rips in half. The bridge area becomes a liferaft, powered by massive fusion engines. The bottom half of the space station houses the Quantum Beacon. Our engines fire us forward, safely out of the way of the Beacon, then we shoot “up” into space, in the small gap between the Corporation warships. They aren’t expecting this, and our brilliant stunt buys us a few moments more of life.

The Beacon itself remains in its secure cage in the bottom half of the ship, the bit we have left behind. And I type in the final commands which instruct the Beacon to begin its teleport program. This is my masterstroke, it took me weeks, nay, months, to come up with this one. The world’s great scientists were baffled by this problem, but I found a way!

Because, you see, the laws of nature forbid teleportation. The Universe just won’t allow it. Hence, the colony ships, and the use of DRs. It would be much easier to walk into a booth in Manhattan and teleport yourself to a planet in the Crab Nebula. But that would violate every principle of modern quantum-relativistic-multiversal string theory, otherwise known as Big Toe. (Toe stands for TOE, which stands for Theory of Everything. There is no “Little Toe”, that’s just some scientist’s idea of a gag. Is that clear or should I explain it all again with diagrams?)

This no-teleporting law is, to me, immensely frustrating. Spock and Kirk and McCoy used to teleport all the time, though for some reason it only worked over short distances from ship to planet. Jeannie the Meanie does it every week in her teatime show I’m a Space Traveller with “tude. Black Hole Holidays is a show entirely based around the assumption that instant teleportation between planets is possible, and for years I thought the space travellers were real people. (They’re not! They’re actors! It’s all a fake! Stay with me, guys, I’m full of these kinds of insights.) But in the real world, tragically, teleportation just can’t happen.

Except, I discovered, the logic of the Quantum Beacon’s quantum paralleling system does allow, in theory, one very limited form of teleportation. This involves patches of space becoming “paired”. First, you program the computer to identify two patches of space which have a roughly comparable pattern of matter distribution. Because of quantum fuzz, this can be a fairly approximate pairing; in quantum reality, a chair and a table would be pretty well indistinguishable. (In fact, the chair would be a table some of the time – baffling, huh?) Both of the paired-up patches of space need to be, obviously, in the region of a Quantum Beacon.

Then you take detailed quantum-state readings of both patches of space, using nanotechnology and very powerful computers. You with me still?

And then, using multi-dimensional infraction theory, the space itself is teleported. Not the matter inside it, not the energy, but the space itself.

This requires (whew!) a reversal of the usual Einsteinian/Leibnitzian principle that all reality can be described in terms of the relationship between things. But it’s not that space is a Thing in Itself, a like, you know, noumenon. It’s the curvature of space, the displacedness of space, that’s identified and teleported. Here’s the patronising metaphor: Imagine a bed with a hollow in it, where a person has been sleeping. Now imagine that hollow can be swapped for the hollow in another, different bed. No one will ever notice the difference; but the hollows will have interchanged. Space will have teleported.

That’s my theory. No one has ever thought of doing it before because, I suppose, it is a totally stupid and futile thing to do. What’s the point of teleporting space! But there is a point. (Finally! Eventually!) The point is:

It doesn’t really work. Space does get teleported, but the process is messy and ugly and it does weird things to dimensional reality.

Things such as this. We look at our plasma screen and see the Corporation warships turn and prepare to pursue. We are a nippy little minnow skeetering off into the ocean. They are the barracudas and the sharks. They will outrun us easily.

But then a green light flashes on my screen. The Teleport function has engaged. It covers a region of space large enough to encircle the warships – but not large enough to encircle us! You see! All this has been carefully and brilliantly planned! The space is then teleported and swapped for a portion of space near a Quantum Beacon in area Q432 of the Milky Way.

And at the precise moment in which spatial teleportation occurs, space itself is rent in a multiplicity of twains.

Just for an instant.

In fact, less than an instant, a tiny portion of an instant, one times ten to the power of millions. But for that brief period, space does what space shouldn’t do. It isn’t there.

The consequences of the rift in space are cataclysmic. To us, from our vantage point speeding niftily away, it’s as if a giant god with an invisible hand has squeezed the Universe. The Corporation warships are crushed instantaneously, and a huge tidal wave of pressure rushes through space. Our ship is tossed and hurled around, suns flare, planets are caught in vast whirlpools hurling round at light speed and further distorting dimensional reality as relativistic effects kick in.

We are swatted away from this vast dimensional hurricane like a fly, and we hurtle through space. Our engines explode. Our hull melts and reforms. Then the Beacon ship itself falls to pieces around us.

We are left floating free in space, secure in our spacesuits. Alby throws his lattice net around us again, and tows us through deep space. I am weeping tears of amazement.

What a fucking mess I just caused! What a total gross-out fucking up of reality!

I ripped a piece of space. No man or child has ever done so much.

I’m the king of the castle!

We float through spaccccee for nearly two years. I find it relaxing. I accept that the ressst of them are sssuffering badly. But they do have food and fluid in their suits, enough to keep them alive for five yearsssss in all.

At lassst, we are picked up by a merchant ship. I flicker away on the outssside of the ship, doing my imperssssonation of a waning comet. The others recccceive their creature comfortsss and a lift to the nearessst habitable planet.