Beyond Uranus

by Stewart Bruce & Nigel Moreland

  “You think you’re so funny McCormack but I’m not due to be in that meeting this morning as I have an appointment with a parent. And as for being late I got into school at seven forty five this morning. Were you even awake at seven forty five?” Maybe people hated him because he was always so smug and an artisan at bullying, oh yes he’d perfected the science of emotional thumping.

  “Look, I’d love to stand here and pass pleasantries with you but I’m a bit late for a meeting. I shall have to give my apologies and explain that I was held up by the Head Teacher.”

  “You’re not funny McCormack and you do know this is the fourth time you’ve been late this week, but then why would you break the habits of a lifetime?”

  “Is this going to last long? By the time I get to this meeting it’ll be all over.”

  “Go now but remember you have a performance management review coming up and I’m going to make sure I’m sitting on that meeting.”

  “Oh no,” I said this with all the emotionless sarcasm I could muster. Minor threats from the Head were, for me anyway, common place and meaningless. I knew that nothing would be or could be done so long as my teaching was judged as good along with my exam results. I turned and continued to walk at a leisurely pace towards the staffroom. “I’m watching you McCormack,” came a fading voice behind me and I chuckled to myself. Batman’s a stalker, but at least he didn’t tell me he loved me.

  I missed the meeting and the day went like most days. Registration had the usual suspects turning up late like every other Thursday, or Wednesday, Tuesday, Monday or Friday for that matter. Lesson one was a brave attempt at teaching year seven pupils how to use a spreadsheet. Set four wasn’t the lowest ability set but they were close. The difference between sets four and five was that most of the kids in four could turn the computers on.

  I thought about playing “Question Bingo”. It’s a game where teachers write five questions they think will be asked by the kids during the lesson. As each question is asked it is crossed off. After the last question you shout out “BINGO!” During the lesson I prepared my five questions:

  How do you add two numbers together?

  Where has my work gone from last lesson?

  Why can’t I save my work?

  Can I go to the toilet?

  Why can’t I do this in Word?

  I think I would have shouted bingo in the first five minutes with seven set four and a total of four times during the lesson.

  The other lessons drearily passed, almost without notice and my shouting ‘BINGO’ was becoming monotonously repetitive. Then suddenly, I was facing the final hurdle of the day’s last class. Through all this though, I couldn’t shake the nagging sensation at the back of my mind that something unexpected was expected. A tiny tendril of thought was quietly ringing a bell, something mellifluous and almost obscured within the mists of important but lost.

  Last up was to be year nine set two. Most of the students had already decided if they were going to opt for the computer course next year so the class had two very distinct groups. One group were hard workers trying to impress me with their I.T. skills and the other group couldn’t give a crap. In ten years of teaching I’d never learnt how to motivate the ‘couldn’t give a crap’ students because my empathic nature meant that I too couldn’t give a crap.

  Had the last five lessons been the only day of my life that I would ever teach, I guess I would have found it interesting. However, after ten years of this I had lost my mojo and it was fair to say I was bored out of my tiny little skull. Let’s face it, I was in the wrong job but trapped in a rut and unable to break or escape from the cycle.

  *

  There was a great feeling of relief when the final bell went, and not just from the kids. I had about four hours worth of marking but I decided to leave it for the weekend because ‘that’s what weekends are for, isn’t it?’ Sods Law meant that the drive home was ironically quick and I was soon watching the news on television. My TV was probably a little too big for my living room and to be honest dominated it, but it was great for playing games on. I guess my whole house was a bit small but two bedrooms seemed fine for somebody that lived by themselves, until Murphy’s Law kicked in and the amount of stuff I accumulated expanded to fill the space available. It was a modern house in a small, quiet estate just far enough from my school for the local kids to go to a different one.

  When I first bought the house the previous owners had been into loud, bright colours and a lot of the rooms were subjugated by colours like sunburst yellow and orange flame. My tastes were much more conservative and I redecorated throughout with more subtle tones of blues, cream and greens. They had left a family of wooden gnomes in the garden and I had taken murderous delight watching them blister and turn to charcoal, smouldering on their own bonfire.

  I checked my watch and as it was only four o’clock I thought I would plug myself into a game and have a couple of hours of playing. I switched my TV to the channel I have for my games console and loaded up my favourite first person shooter, put my headphones and microphone on and waited to join a death match. I found a good one with sixty five players. The idea of the game was to shoot everybody and even when they all decided to join forces against me during the second game I still came out on top of the leader board, too easy.

  I went back to the main menu and chose another shooter and joined the first available multiplayer game. “Oh Christ not Zombie Love” Came a soft American accent over my ear piece. This was a more intimate killing field with only five players.

  “Who in the hell is Zombie Love?” asked another player.

  “Do you like winning?” said the first player.

  “Yea, of course I do,” said the second.

  “Then forget it cos you ain’t gotta chance with Zombie Love in the game.”

  By this time I had five kills so I decided to join in the conversation. “Come on lads be sporting. Remember it’s not about winning it’s about how you play the game that’s important. A bit like the Korean war but with less blood.”

  “You’re full of shit Zombie Love,” said one of the players.

  “Jesus Christ I swear to God I didn’t see him,” came the player’s voice I’d just killed.

  Over the next five minutes the conversation of the other players turned to co-operation and a pact that they only fired on me and not on each other. I loved it when this happened in a game because it presented me with a much bigger challenge. Playing against real people was brilliant because they are often unpredictable and much more of a challenge than the artificial intelligence built into the games for single player mode. Players joining forces to fight against me was increasingly common in most shooter games but I loved the challenge and didn’t take it as an insult.

  The funny thing was that after an hour of playing the game the same players were still in the game and still trying to remove me from the top of the leader board. I didn’t mind the insults I was hearing over my headphones or the shouting or swearing because I knew deep down that they were having as much fun trying to beat me as I was winning.

  “Sorry guys I need to stop and get something to eat. I’ll be back in about an hour if you want to be a bunch of losers again.” There was a stream of abuse from most of the players about me leaving followed by them saying their goodbyes in various fashions, some of them not rude.

  It was about 6.00pm and so a pizza went into the oven and some lager went into the fridge. At 6.20 I was eating the best warmed up frozen pizza money could buy and opening my first can of lager. As I chomped through my slice of pizza I thought about the night’s entertainment. What to do or more precisely what to play? I didn’t watch much TV, I would catch the news when I came home and that would be about it. I hated the ‘reality’ shows where you take everyday people and put them into manufactured situations and to be honest, I hated the most of the rest of it too. So, as a rule, my evenings would be spent marking schoolwork or playing computer games.

  I’d played an
d finished single player mode on all of my vast collection but my biggest passion was playing online, against other opponents and the more there were the more I liked it. I didn’t mind what genre game I was playing as long as I could play it against other people. It was this absorbing hobby that kept me awake to the early hours and made me late for work but I was hooked because I was good, very good. In the last five months of playing I was unbeaten, which was a very private fact that I was very proud of.

  After finishing my pizza and clearing up the cardboard and cellophane, I went to the fridge to collect the second lager of the evening. As I open the fridge door and reached for the can, the front door bell rang. I picked up the lager and thought ‘That’s funny.’ It was funny because I didn’t get evening visitors. I’d invite friends around occasionally but they generally didn’t pop round unannounced. I opened my lager and walked towards the front door. The bell rang again. “OK, OK, keep your hair on,” I said under my breath.

  As I opened the door there stood a man with the bearing of a club bouncer – no that’s unfair, he was broad but not fat and wobbly like some bouncers. He was wearing a black suit, about my height with very white albino-like skin, short spiky white hair and black rimmed glasses with lenses that had a pink tinge to them. There was a few seconds of silence followed by me saying “Yes?”

  The man looked at me and as he did I couldn’t help but notice his eyes. They darted left and right like he was looking at a rapid tennis match or a speeded up version of that early video game Pong.

  “Roy McCormack?”

  “Yes. But I’m not buying anything and I don’t want God.”

  “That’s good because I’m not selling anything. My name is Simon Philberts, do you mind if I come in? I have a job opportunity that I’d like to offer you. May I please come in to discuss the terms?”

  I thought about this. Could it be that one of the companies I’d applied to years before had actually kept my information on file and were now looking for an I.T. specialist with an interest in education? I realised that this could be a job offer that could get me out of my crappy teaching job. His voice sounded normal enough, though what the local axe murderer would have sounded like I didn’t know, I took a punt. “OK,” I said, “but this had better be good.

  I opened the door further so Simon could step through, closed the door behind him and led him into my living room. We shook hands, mine buried in his, but his grip was light so this certainly wasn’t the hand of a bouncer or bailiff or even a manual worker and certainly not a murderer, I thought. I held my hand out and gestured to an arm chair in which Simon sat, well more correctly he sort of graciously flowed into the chair which groaned under the weight of a man a good deal heavier than I.

  Just at that moment my phone rang, “Please excuse me I should get that, but I won’t be a moment, I’ll ask them to call me back later.”

  “Fine, we’ll talk afterwards Mr McCormack.”

  I crossed over to the phone and answered giving my number.

  “Roy,” It was my mum, “I was feeling a bit lonely so I thought I’d ring for a chat.”

  “Mum, that’s fine but I have someone here at the moment, a visitor, erm Simon Philberts I think he said.”

  “Oh! OK then Roy, you talk to your Simon, I’ll call you tomorrow then?”

  “Yes let’s talk tomorrow mum. Goodbye.” I put the phone down. Mum seemed strangely quick to leave us to it and I’m sure there was an edge to her voice when she said ‘your Simon’. I brushed the uneasy feeling aside and turned towards my visitor.

  “So, what exactly do you want?” I said, as I sat in the chair adjacent to him.

  “You are Roy McCormack.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you teach.”

  “Yes.”

  “And play a lot of online games.”

  “Yes.”

  “Which you use the online game tag of Zombie Love.”

  “Erm Yeeess.” I responded hesitatingly, starting to wonder where this was going.

  “I work for a company that seeks out and recruits people with certain talents. We recruit people in all sorts of professions but your gaming ability has really shown up on our radar and we would like to offer you a position within our organisation. The work you will do is not directly related to the computer games industry, but you will find your skills very useful if you can adapt them to various other situations. We only recruit the best and are very selective to whom we make a job offer.” Simon spoke in a boring monotone. It was like he was giving me the most important information of my life but didn’t care because he’d said it a thousand times before.

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing and my optimism flowered. ‘This could be it,’ I thought. ‘I bet this could be a chance to earn mega bucks and get out of teaching. Even if there wasn’t a huge amount of money it could still be a way out of teaching.’ I was hooked. “OK, you’ve got my attention so tell me more.”

  “I cannot be too precise with the information at this moment but I can give you hints about what we want. Once you’ve signed your contract I can reveal all the information you need but the main thing to know at the moment is this. This is a onetime offer and if you decline you will never be approached again. You have twenty four hours to decide if you want to accept the offer. If you agree then you start on Saturday and will be collected at nine o’clock in the morning. Whilst you are working for us, for reasons that will become apparent, any contact with friends and family will have to be minimal.”

  I though the last part wasn’t too bad because I didn’t have many friends. My mum would phone every now and again but she lived three hundred miles away, which was a five or six hour drive. I hadn’t had a girlfriend in eight years, not since dating ‘Bridget the Midget’ who was actually six feet tall. However, having only twenty four hours to decide and starting on Saturday was cutting it short. “What about my job?”

  “Our research suggests you are not that bothered about teaching?” said Simon. “However, we will sort out all the paper work with your school and the local authorities so it won’t be a problem. You do hate your job don’t you? And if you accept this offer I promise you that you won’t look back financially, nor will you need to teach again.”

  “OK then,” I said, “so what can you tell me?”

  Simon eased himself forward on the chair and looked straight at me. Well at least his head was pointing in my direction, his eyes continued their dance. “The job placement is far away,” he said. I waited for him to give more information but that’s as much as he said.

  I scratched my chin and said “Like Gateshead?”

  “It’s much further than Gateshead.”

  “Newcastle?”

  There was a pause as Simon seemed to consider if I was taking the Michael or just being very stupid. He opted for the stupid conclusion. “It’s even further than Newcastle and you are going to take some time to truly appreciate how far this offer will take you.” he said.

  “Is it in this country?”

  “No.”

  “Europe?”

  “No.”

  “Got it. Australia.”

  “No.”

  I started thinking out aloud. “How can that be? Australia is around the other side if the planet from us. You cannot get further than Australia.”

  “You’re thinking in very linear terms Mister McCormack. Try to think a bit more out of this world.”

  I chuckled to myself and said “The moon!”

  “I hear the laughing and you are now thinking more three dimensionally, but you are still light years from the truth.”

  “Saturn?”

  “Not even warm.”

  “Jupiter?”

  “Jupiter is closer to Earth than Saturn.” His eyes picked up tempo again and then slowed down.

  “Your Anus!”

  “I think you will find it’s pronounced Uranus.”

  I put on my best posh English accent and said “I think you’ll find it’s pronounced Y
our Anus.”

  “Uranus.”

  “Your Anus.”

  “I am sure it is pronounced Uranus.”

  “Are you English?” I asked.

  “No,” said Simon.

  “Are you from Earth?”

  “Err... you may struggle with this, but no.”

  “Ah, that explains a lot! Then as a fully qualified Englishman and true born Earthman I can definitely tell you that it is absolutely pronounced Your Anus.”

  Simon’s eyes had gone into overdrive. Although his speech remained at the same speed and it still had the same monotone boring lilt to it, I could tell he was getting very annoyed. Through almost gritted teeth he said “Let’s leave the pronunciation and move on. Further than Ur... the planet we’ve been discussing.”

  “After that there’s just Neptune and Pluto but Pluto’s been downgraded to a minor planet.”

  Simon’s eyes had returned to their usual game of pong. “Excellent and well done. Now think about the distance between Earth and Pluto, about three billion miles. Take that number and double it and that’s the distance of your new job.”

  I could feel my eyebrows rise. I didn’t quite know what to think. I could feel the opportunity of a life time disappear as I consumed the information or was it disinformation? It was certainly too fantastic to believe. Simon was obviously a nut case with no job offer. Perhaps I should have felt angry with him for wasting my time but I actually felt a little depressed because I’d been so excited about the prospect of getting a real job in I.T. with a big salary, company car and all the trimmings. What I’d actually been offered was completely nuts and this man, if you could call him that, was blatantly one can short of the full six.

  “So what you’re offering is a job that you cannot tell me anything about. You want me to sign the contract tomorrow and the job placement is out in space, twice the distance of Pluto.”

  Simon looked intense and his eyes had slowed to a steady beginners tennis match. Then he said “I know it all sounds a bit fantastic but this could be the opportunity of a lifetime for you. What I need you to do is to take a leap of faith. Trust me and you will never regret your decision.”