Philip Palmer - Debatable Space

Then the winds would pass, and we would return to the surface. And for weeks afterwards, dust would fall as rain, until equilibrium was once again reached.

But for the most part, the climate was temperate, and so were the inhabitants. And I spent almost all of my time in the library. I found I was even cultivating a cool, measured, slow way of talking, my subliminal response to living on what was in effect a planet-wide public library.

TV was my salvation. When McIvor wasn’t around, I voraciously devoured the Earth soaps and the new drama series from the Second Wave colonies. I could easily watch six hours of television in a single sitting – movies, comedies, reality shows, art installations, I watched or experienced them all, and loved them all equally, and undiscriminatingly.

I watched the news avidly too. I was aware of every detail of the war that had broken out between two non-human species in the O Sector, the Heebie Jeebies and the Sparklers. The Heebie Jeebies are oxygen-breathing carrion-eating fast-moving little skulky things. The Sparklers, by contrast, are carbon monoxide-breathing flying predators which have an electromagnetic inner body that allows them to bioluminesce, and expel lightning bolts. Both species coexisted on different planets in the same planetary system, but knew nothing of each other’s existence until a spacecraft full of Lopers attempted to colonise the system. The sun, a Cepheid variable, proved to be too high in ultraviolet, and too unpredictable, so the Lopers relaunched and tried elsewhere. But as a consequence of their contact with the two alien sentients, an idea-seed was planted which allowed both species to independently develop space travel.

Earth was of course monitoring the possibility that either or both of these species could be a threat to human colonies. But in the first instance, the Heebie Jeebies devoted all their energy to building a space cannon that could pot holes into the Sparklers’ home planet (which the Lopers called, cringe-makingly, Tinkerbell). And the Sparklers, for their part, were honing their bioengineering skills, with the aim of building a multi-organism Sparkler gestalt entity that could launch a massive kamikaze assault on the Heebie Jeebies’ home world, HJ.

It was a preposterous quarrel to the death between a right hand and a left hand; and the news vids covered it exhaustively. I even knew the names of the Heebie Jeebie leaders and generals; and could just about recognise the various members of the Sparkler high command even though, frankly, Sparklers all look pretty much alike.

But soon after that, Earth was invaded; and my attention switched to that long-running reality show instead. (The Sparklers won, by the way, and are now a much-feared space-travelling species. And the Heebie Jeebies de-evolved into non-sentience, a surprisingly common xenobiological event.)

But, reverting to the invasion of Earth: What a marvel it was! Rarely have I been so thrilled by a news event. So much carnage, so much bloodshed. And to think, my own son did all that!

My colleagues were equally enraptured at the amazing events happening all those light years away, which we were able to watch happening contemporaneously thanks to the Quantum Beacon signals. We even found a way to capitalise upon the invasion, by creating brilliantly edited DVD-Roms of the event which we disseminated to every planet in human space (about two hundred of them at that time) via Quantum Beacon. And we marvelled at the ease with which a single mercenary army could capture the home civilisation of the human race.

My son was like a shark in a swimming pool. His fleet was trained in space combat. And his soldiers were skilled and battle-hardened after years of fighting dangerous aliens, and were armed with weapons which were custom-built to cause devastation and wreak genocide.

A battle took place which dwarfed the greatest wars of history. Fleets of warships burned, asteroids were used as battering rams, and laser beams sliced up space stations into glittering shards.

Then Peter’s ships rained fire on the planet Earth, from their position of space superiority. Napalm and acid derivatives were housed in rocket shells which shattered in the upper atmosphere and left the skies denuded of birds for days. Forests boiled and bubbled, and the oceans were coated with an eerie slime that was fatal to the touch.

Fusion bombs were exploded on the Moon, sending chunks of rock flying into space which were then steered back into the Earth’s atmosphere. As a consequence, vast exploding chunks of Moon landed on North America and Australia. The damage was relatively minor, but the psychological terror of it was intense.

And one missile was fired into the Atlantic ocean, ripping through the water and detonating on the muddy bottom, causing a huge vortex to be created that nearly touched the sky. The resulting tornados and tsunamis wrecked and flooded homes and lands on every Atlantic coast.

Peter stopped short of dispatching plagues of frogs and locusts and holograms of the Four Horsemen of the Armageddon, but in every other respect he constructed an invasion that was deliberately intended to evoke and echo Armageddon. There was mass panic, and mass suicide – and entire armies threw down their weapons.

Faced with this overwhelming firepower, and unbelievable psych warfare acuity, the Earth President, a toad of a man called Chapel, capitulated. My son came to power. And thus he became the first person in all of history to conquer the entire planet Earth.

His first act was to abolish the World Council and the office of President of Humanity. Instead, in a glorious public relations coup, he declared that all the “satellite” planets of Earth were, from this moment forward, to be independent and self-governing. Unity would be achieved through trade, as Asimov had prophesied; and the days of imperial rule were over.

He also, in passing, established a Universal Trading Corporation of which he was sole shareholder and Chief Executive Officer. The Corporation’s first act was to charge all planets for information sent or received on the Quantum Beacons. It was, in effect, a massive and lucrative tax on all colonies, but no one realised that. The euphoria on all the inhabited planets of the Universe was intense and palpable. Freedom from Earth’s tyranny!

Sadly, it didn’t turn out that way. The Corporation was not a government; but it had absolute power. And, through the technology of the Doppelganger Robots, my son the Chief Executive Officer (Cheo) became de facto Emperor of the Human Universe.

Years later, he invited me to visit him, on Earth. Naturally I accepted.

As I explained, I was lonely.

I never thought that I would see

Such beauty and such tragedy

And foolish fucked up blazin’ wasted lives

And un’xpected sublimity

I never thought that I would see

So much of life, and of the genius of our universe

Before visiting my son, I got myself a new liver and a skin rejuve. I burned all my clothes and chose a whole new wardrobe from our designer collection. I went for a shiny ochre look with my clothing, and my hair was raven-black. I glowed, I was sublime. And I looked as if I was going to see my lover.

I chose cryosleep for the journey. It doesn’t save you anything – your body still ages the same number of subjective years. But it avoids the tedium of years in transit, playing auto-chess and rereading so-called literary classics.

I was woken when we reached Pluto. In Earth Time I had been away for 130 years or so. And in that time, the grand project of transforming the Sol system had advanced hugely.

Jupiter had rings now. A vast space factory made up of hundreds of separate but interconnected units hung in permanent orbit around the huge gas giant, powered by energy pumps in the heart of the planet’s boiling atmosphere. The man-made ring blended with and accentuated Jupiter’s own natural but fairly anonymous ring system (which of course is invisible to most low-grade telescopes from Earth itself).