Саймон Ингс - The Smoke

From that, everything follows. Since the first protozoa assembled themselves, species have been expanding to fill the niches available to them; have reached carrying capacity; exceeded it; and died. ‘The greatest human achievement was its magical ability to cheat the limits of carrying capacity by altering its environment. The Bund’s more recent achievement is to accept, and act upon the knowledge, that this human magic also has its limits.’

I think this is what, above all, puzzles non-Bundists and fuels our occasional hatreds: our sense that the Bund is hypocritically preaching restraint on the one hand while throwing off all shackles to expansion with the other. For heaven’s sake, it has begun to mine the Moon! The Bund, to the contrary, would have it that its own dizzying, so-fast-as-to-be-unfollowable growth is possible because it understands the limits to growth better than anyone else. ‘If bugs in a jar reproduce once every minute, and by midnight the jar is full, at what time is the jar half-full?’

This Stella had remembered. Familiar enough as I was with the riddle, it still took me an incredulous moment, a split-second of scepticism, before I confirmed the answer in all its enormity: ‘At one minute to midnight the jar is still only half-full.’

‘You see?’ Stella clapped her hands, delighted.

One minute to midnight, and the future looks bright, the possibilities endless, or almost endless. A whole half-jar remains unexploited!

A minute later, everything starves. Everything dies. Everything ends. This was the Bund’s point of pride: that it understood the exponential function in its bones; was trained up to it; was born to it. It thought in curves and, in so doing, knew how to evade environmental limits long before impacting with them.

‘Do have another little cake.’

‘I’m done.’

‘Not at these prices, you’re not,’ Stella snapped. ‘At these prices we’re licking the bloody plates.’

I picked one with a strawberry on top as the healthiest-looking option. Underneath the fruit was a cr è me p â tissi è re so thick I needed an extra cup of tea to wash it down.

Stella took the opportunity to check her phone. Georgy had got it for her to help her organise the shooting schedule for DARE . The first live-action filming was just a fortnight away, and a second-unit crew made up of final-year film students was already at work making stock footage of the models I had built for the show: submarine, mobiles, interceptors, satellites, assorted Earth- and Moon-based launch platforms; also some simple pyrotechnic work.

She pecked hazily at the screen, saw me looking, sighed and dropped the phone on the table.

‘I’m never going to get the hang of this thing.’

‘I’m sure you will,’ I said, but only out of form’s sake. I knew how impossible it was. Just the night before, Fel had cuddled up beside me in bed and tried showing me how she planned our evenings on the tablet she was always hauling around with her. Images sprang from the screen in 3D and she started knitting patterns together as though plucking a harp. All I could do was laugh.

‘What? It only takes practice,’ she said. Perhaps she was trying to be kind. We both knew it wasn’t true.

Stella had tried moving her scripts onto glass; the logic of text manipulation had held reasonably fast in the transition between media and she spoke enthusiastically about the speed at which she was able to turn cast scripts into shooting schedules. Suddenly the (Bundist) lighting cameraman and the cinematographer were accessing her work even while she was tapping away at it, her whole screen blizzarding in green and purple. She’d had to abandon the work to them. She was enough of a professional to know that film-making is a collaborative business and that her film crew knew a lot more about the mechanics of a shooting schedule than she did. You could see that it hurt, though: how work she had assumed would take a week came back to her, without her input, late in the evening of the same day.

Episode seventeen upped the ante by launching a story arc to carry the first series to its cliffhanger conclusion. (Stella had it in mind that a second series of DARE , if green-lit, would eschew standalone episodes altogether. She would run the show, developing its narrative ‘spine’, while professional writers drawn from theatre would collaborate on individual episodes.)

In episode seventeen, the aliens launch a concerted attack on the moonbase – DARE’s first line of defence. At first, the attack appears tactical, but by episode nineteen it is clear that the UFOs are arriving for the long haul. Despite swingeing losses, they begin to construct a nigh-on impregnable bridgehead on the Moon’s far side, using material time-shifted one second into the future. Cut off from their lines of communication, the crew of DARE’s moonbase lack vital intelligence on the nature of the aliens’ ‘chronoconcrete’. Unaware that their attacks are simply strengthening the enemy’s hand by providing them with a vital extra source of ‘chronic energy’, they succumb, one by one, to mysterious, invisible ground-assaults.

With extra episodes to devise, Stella was using me as her sounding board. Our teas were more frequent, which pleased my sweet tooth, but they were closer to script meetings than family catch-ups. As Stella’s ideas for DARE developed, it grew clear, at least to me, that I was not the best reader she could have chosen. It was all too obvious where her latest ideas were coming from. She seemed to me to be working out her feelings about looking after my mother – none too subtly, neither.

By episode twenty, DARE’s secret Shepperton HQ has developed an effective portable countermeasure involving resonant crystals, and the aliens are flushed from their bridgehead.

Submarine-launched interceptors land successfully within the perimeter of the now abandoned alien station, and ground crews set out to explore the structure.

In the final reel of the final episode, they find the moonbase’s ‘dead’ crew.

They are not dead, but they are not really alive, either. Helpless, strapped to gurneys, dripping blood and worse, many have had their organs harvested and their vital functions are being maintained by sophisticated machines.

‘In the second series, brilliant surgeons will pack these life-support systems into the victims’ still-living bodies, and these cybernetically enhanced personnel will form a new, elite line of defence for the DARE organisation,’ Stella explained. ‘They’re not just stronger, not just faster; their ordeal has bestowed on them a deep insight into the minds of the invaders.’ She could see I wanted to interrupt and, to stop me, she turned her attention to the teapot, adding hot water, stirring, pouring, talking all the while: ‘But with this knowledge comes a certain sympathy for the aliens – these last desperate representatives of a dying world. As the second series builds to a crisis, you won’t be entirely sure whose side these familiar characters are actually on.’

‘I think,’ I began (I knew I had to tread carefully), ‘I think we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves. You want the first series to end with a shot of the show’s most engaging characters eviscerated on surgical beds?’

‘It doesn’t have to be graphic.’

‘It doesn’t?’

I didn’t want to be angry with her, but it was all I could do not to shake her. Betty was only just out of her latest bout of ‘life-saving’ surgery. I assumed this was where Stella had got the idea. By now my mother had hardly any internal organs left.

It is a measure of the love Betty and Stella felt for each other that, almost until the last, it survived the radically different choices they had made in life. As a young woman, Stella had chosen a life in which she could decide things for herself. Betty, marrying young, and marrying Bob, chose to have her life dictated by a husband. She never thought to resent her sister’s success, and I suspect this is partly because she did not recognise it as success. In my memory, Mum, while fond of Stella, always spoke rather disparagingly about what she was ‘getting up to’. The real fullness of life, in Betty’s opinion, was to be obtained through home and family. And given that these, in our case, consisted of a tin bath in the parlour and Bob rolling in drunk every Friday and Saturday night, you could only admire her faith.