Interstellar Caveman

by Karl Beecher

  “Ms. Tyresa does occasionally feel the need to prioritise work-related tasks. I wouldn’t take it personally, sir.”

  Colin harrumphed. He was already familiar with Ade’s linguistic creativity. Ade saying she occasionally prioritised work probably meant she was a ruthlessly ambitious workaholic.

  He began to place the clothes inside Colin’s closet. “I trust you are enjoying your stay so far, sir?”

  “Don’t be silly, Ade,” replied Colin. “Do you think anyone enjoys staying in hospital?”

  “I really couldn’t say, sir,” replied the android, folding a pair of trousers. “I’ve never had the need to stay in a hospital.”

  “Well, whatever the equivalent is for you. I’m sure you don’t enjoy… going in for maintenance.”

  “On the contrary, sir. A software upgrade. Replacing a faulty component. I rather look forward to it.”

  “Humans are different.”

  “Very true, sir.”

  Colin sighed and flopped onto the bed. The bed monitor lit up with a urinalysis and a sperm count. “I’m just irritable, that’s all. Everything here is strange to me. I’m surrounded by technology, and I don’t know how to work it. Not only that, but everyone’s treating me either like a freakshow attraction or a scientific curiosity, especially those morbid rubberneckers this morning.”

  “‘Morbid rubberneckers,’ sir?”

  “The doctors who examined me. It was like being a zoo animal taken to the vet. All that poking and prodding and inserting. And it seemed to go rather beyond purely medical interest, if you ask me: measuring the size of my cranium, the size of my jaw, the size of… well, other things.”

  “Most discomforting, sir.”

  “And the questions too! I can understand them wanting to know about my diet. Maybe about my hobbies too. But asking me about mating habits? That just wasn’t on.”

  “Most distressing, sir.”

  “And to top it all off, they didn’t actually tell me anything. I have to wait for my test results.”

  “I gather you’re referring specifically to your brain scan.”

  “Exactly,” said Colin. “I’ve no idea what state my disease is in. I don’t even know if it’s treatable. Waiting around for the news is unbearable.”

  “My sympathies, sir.”

  “Thanks.” At that moment, it struck Colin that the android was the only person he’d met since his revival to express any kind of sympathy. “Thank you, Ade.”

  “You’re welcome, sir.” He closed the closet, but a couple of items remained over his arm. “Might I suggest taking a walk to distract yourself? I would be happy to accompany you and show you around.”

  Colin thought about it. Maybe some fresh air would be a help. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  “Some suitable attire, sir.” Ade laid the last couple of items onto the bed. A pair of shiny, grey trousers and some sort of coat with a white body, reflective blue arms and a collar that reminded him of a Nehru jacket.

  It was not exactly Colin’s style. “Is that fashionable?”

  “This style is, as they say, all the rage, sir.”

  Colin sighed. “Oh, all right.” He began to unfasten his gown. “I suppose I need to get with the times. I was stylish in my own time, you know. But I guess even paisley has to go out of fashion sometime…”

  Just as he pulled the gown down over his shoulders, he froze and looked at Ade. Ade looked agreeably back at him.

  “Um…” began Colin. “Could you turn around please?”

  “Sir?”

  “Would you turn around?”

  “You wish me to turn around, sir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very good, sir.” Ade proceeded to turn three hundred and sixty degrees on the spot.

  “No,” said Colin. “I’m getting undressed now.”

  “I gathered that, sir.”

  “And so I don’t want you to look at me while I’m doing it. Turn away!”

  “Very good, sir.” Ade turned his back to Colin.

  Colin continued to undress. “I take it this is the normal attitude to nudity around these parts, eh?” he said. “No shame in showing your naked body? Something else I need to adapt to?”

  “Indeed, sir,” replied Ade. “Shame in one’s nudity is quite unknown on Ceti.”

  “Oh, lord help us,” he groaned, grabbing the trousers from the bed. “The future’s liberated.”

  After leaving the room, Ade helped Colin locate a more ordinary toilet—one which didn’t converse with its user or offer reading suggestions—elsewhere in the building.

  His call of nature finally satisfied, Colin left the hospital with Ade and passed through its gardens. The grass there was a familiar shade of green, but Colin recognised none of the native plants. They looked exotic and ancient, the sorts of weird flora depicted in dinosaur books. Still, nature was nature, and their strange beauty lifted Colin’s spirits.

  Which dropped as soon as they left the hospital grounds and emerged into a busy plaza, long and wide and as full with people as central London during Christmas season. Thousands of people surrounded him, all scurrying here and there like ants at a fancy dress party. Skirts and trousers flickered between colours. T-shirts bore animated slogans. And some hairstyles seemed to defy the laws of physics.

  High above the people and the noise stretched the buildings and towers that Colin saw from the ship. They looked even bigger and grander from down here. Running alongside the towers hung, seemingly by magic, the opaque tunnels of the hypertube. Above all of this, streams of flying cars and spacecraft formed floating lanes of traffic.

  Ade led Colin along the plaza, the Earthman staring around wide-eyed like a farm boy making his first trip to the big city. As he soaked in the surroundings, he spotted things familiar to any city-dweller past or present—shops, cafés, restaurants—and felt a little more at ease for it. People here were doing things that the inhabitants of Ancient Rome might have done: spending money, gossiping on street corners, philosophising over drinks.

  But still, every piece of familiarity was tainted with the bizarrely foreign. The cafés served coffee that appeared orange and smelled all wrong. Everything in the restaurants looked abnormal and unappetising. And shopping was nothing more than browsing an array of holograms in an otherwise empty store and picking a product for immediate delivery to your home. Convenient? Yes. No annoying sales assistants? Wonderful. But nowhere near as satisfying as browsing hands-on a shop full of goodies.

  They stopped at a crossroads where four wide avenues met, and Colin looked around. It dawned on him that, despite being surrounded by fellow humans, he felt like he was standing on an alien world.

  Before he could ask Ade where to go next, he heard a voice behind them.

  “Excuse me?”

  Colin turned to see a young man standing there. He was dressed in a multi-coloured poncho with a long white skirt down to his ankles and wore his hair in ponytails—eight ponytails to be precise. Over one eye, he had something that looked like a monocle with flashing lights on it. Colin became anxious and worried that the man was a nutter, but then realised his appearance actually made him blend in. He looked no more out of place than a man with a grey suit, and side parting would have in Colin’s home town.

  The stranger looked at Ade. “Excuse me,” he said politely. “You’re Ade, aren’t you, android assigned to Doctor Jak?”

  “I am, sir,” replied Ade. “May I be of assistance?”

  “I thought so,” he said, tapping the monocle. “I ID’d you on my vizi.” He turned to Colin excitedly. “That must mean… are you the caveman?”

  Colin was taken aback. His face contorted as he tried to fathom what the man was talking about.

  The young man turned to Ade. “Oh, sorry. Can he understand me?”

  “Yes,” barked Colin. “I can understand you, young man. I just have no idea what you’re talking about. My name is Colin.”

  The man’s face lit up. “Oh my dog, it is you! S
upernova! I can’t grok it.” He grabbed Colin’s hand and shook it. “Welcome, Colin Douglass.”

  “Um… thank you,” stuttered Colin. “But what do you mean by ‘caveman’?”

  The stranger shrugged. “That’s just what people are calling you. ’Cos you were found in cave.”

  Colin now became indignant. He didn’t like strangers approaching him in the street, and he certainly didn’t like people thinking he lived in a cave. “I was not found in a cave. I was in a suspended animation facility in an underground cavern. Anyway, how do you know my name?”

  “Everyone studying archaeology is talking about you, friend. We heard about you on the bulletins when Doctor Jak landed. A centuries-old frozen guy, still living. Just photonic! How long were you in there? Was it, like, a thousand years or whatever?”

  “What? Um… I don’t know. It hasn’t been determined yet. Look, would you mind awfully—”

  “Is everything here, like, totally whacked out for you now? I bet it is. Everything’s changed, right? What’s the biggest change you’ve seen so far?”

  Colin struggled to remain polite and accommodating. The biggest change? He looked at the man’s hair and clothes. He looked at the android beside him, the impossibly-shaped buildings, floating transit tunnels, the flying cars and stream of spaceships above them. “Well,” he said finally. “Talking toilets are a new one on me.”

  “Ha!” the man guffawed and slapped Colin playfully on the arm. “That’s jocular, man, jocular. What about food? What did you used to, like, eat?”

  “Look, I’d love to answer all your questions,” he replied, growing increasingly irritable and trying to think of a way out of this conversation, “but my friend Ade here is taking me to a very important appointment, right Ade?”

  “Sir?”

  “You know,” said Colin. “The thing. You’re taking me to the… the thing… at the… at the place.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t quite foll–”

  “Decontamination!” exclaimed Colin, blurting out the first sciencey, futuristic excuse he could think of. “That’s it. Ade here is taking me off for decontamination. Best not to get too close to me.”

  The stranger’s face dropped. “Oh.” He looked at his hand, the one he’d use to shake Colin’s. “Oh. Right then… don’t let me keep you.”

  The man left, rubbing his hand on his gown as he went.

  Colin waited until he out of earshot, then turned to Ade. “Bloody hell, Ade, why didn’t you follow my lead?”

  “Sir?”

  “I was trying to get away from the guy. I was making up an excuse for us to leave. I fed you a line, you were supposed to go along with it.”

  “You mean lie, sir?”

  “If you want to call it that, then yes.”

  “I couldn’t do that, it would be most unethical for me to lie. If I may ask, sir, why did you not wish to speak with the gentleman?”

  “Because,” said Colin, “he was like those bloody doctors earlier today. Presuming to just fire questions at me. Treating me like a museum exhibit.” He sighed and rubbed his temples. He was feeling a little overwhelmed by everything. “That’s it. I need a drink. A real drink, right now. Take me to a bar, Ade.”

  “Very good, sir. Any preference as to which?”

  “The nearest.”

  Ade pointed to a building on the corner.

  “You know, Ade,” said Colin, as they walked along, “I was led to believe you were an advanced artificial intelligence.”

  “I am, sir.”

  “You say that, but it’s not very clever of you to forego fibbing completely, is it? It can be useful, you just need the intelligence to work out when. Perhaps, I should teach you this trick of playing along.”

  “A most meritorious suggestion, no doubt, sir.”

  “Now, you may think it’s uneth—”

  “Hi, there!”

  “–thaaaggh!” Colin screamed. A young woman had—there was no other word for it—materialised directly in front of him. Despite her unconventional way of making an entrance, she looked otherwise normal, being dressed in a bright green jacket and white trousers. Her smile, however, wide like a Cheshire Cat, verged on being manic.

  “Can I trouble you for a moment of your time?” she said, staring at Colin like a brightly optimistic serial killer. “I want to talk to you about the Mackralese cat population of Epsindi II. Did you know that this poor species is on the verge of extinction…”

  As she talked, Colin fought to regain his breath and reduce his heart rate to somewhere back under two hundred beats per minute. He tried to interrupt her. “Um, no, sorry…”

  The woman continued undeterred. “…due to local trilithium refining activities that pollute the atmosphere…”

  “No, look,” said Colin. “Thank you, but I’m not…”

  “…to a population of less than one thousand. With just a small contribution you could…” She continued to talk, almost as though Colin wasn’t really there.

  He looked to Ade for an explanation. “Is she deaf or something?”

  “Merely a hologram, sir,” said the android. “Fundraising for good causes.”

  Colin looked around the vicinity and saw other similarly-dressed spectral charity workers popping in and out of existence and pestering pedestrians. Then he looked back towards his own assailant. She was still talking.

  Some things never change, thought Colin.

  A thought occurred to him and smirk appeared on his face. He walked forwards, straight through the hologram without breaking stride, and left her behind.

  After Ade caught up with him, Colin looked at the android and smiled. “Ade, I’ve wanted to do that for years.”

  18

  Some things never change. They’ve always been that way, and always will be.

  The planets turn. The stars burn. Life is born, it struggles, and it dies. Suns go supernovae, scattering themselves far and wide. Black holes hoover up the remains.

  And academics have meetings.

  Like all laws of the universe, there are exceptions. As an academic, Tyresa Jak ought to have lived to attend meetings just as the rule of nature dictated. But meetings weren’t her style. She was happier out in the field, a scope in one hand and a sonic shovel in the other (and a proton pistol at her hip, just in case).

  Tyresa’s ship had barely touched down on Ceti before she received the summons to attend an urgent meeting with the Dean. It didn’t say why, but she was pretty sure nothing enjoyable would be waiting for her.

  After dumping Colin at the hospital, she parked the Turtle at the spaceport then took the hypertube across town. She didn’t waste time changing her clothes, so she arrived at the Archaeological School still wearing her standard field garbs: combat trousers, sturdy boots, shirt, and canvas vest. Nonetheless, as she walked through the hallways, nobody looked twice at her. Compared to her staid colleagues, Tyresa might have looked as out of place as a surfer at an undertaker’s convention, but everyone had long since grown accustomed to seeing her clomp around the place looking like an off-duty soldier.

  The meeting room was already occupied by the time she arrived. A little screen beside the double doors listed who was inside:

  Professor Em Ju-Desh, Dean, School of Archaeology

  Doctor Streeb Sojawotz, Assistant to the Dean

  Professor Atiko Phrizbott, Government Liaison

  Tyresa looked at the names. It was a given that Ju-Desh would be there. And if Ju-Desh was there, that snivelling little kiss-ass Sojawotz would be there too.

  And Phrizbott was there. Damn.

  Phrizbott was a tricky one. His vague job title reflected his shadowy activities. He was technically an academic but wasn’t really active in any field. All Tyresa knew for sure was that the shady bastard also had some kind of role in the Alliance’s security services and that he tended to show up when one of two things had happened: either Tyresa’s activities had caused trouble or Phrizbott had a job for her.

  Usuall
y, it was both.

  Inside the meeting room, her ‘hosts’ were seated at one end of a long conference table. Tyresa was met by three blank expressions. The only sound was Tyresa’s boots thudding along the floor as she approached the opposite end of the table.

  The atmosphere was frosty, but that was no reason to be uncivil. “Good afternoon, everybody,” said Tyresa.

  The stony faces stared back. Trouble was brewing. Tyresa tried to look blasé and hide her apprehension. Conflict she could deal with, relish even, but these trials in all but name with the deck stacked against her, not so much.

  Ju-Desh sat in the middle of the three. She beckoned towards a chair and Tyresa dropped into it, the Professor then picked up a slate and began to read. Those eyes, moving from side to side, thin and framed by wrinkles, allowed only tiny glimpses of their owner’s wily intelligence.

  Eventually, the Professor looked up and spoke in a voice that always operated at one volume: loud and clear. “I have a message here from the Internal Security Department of the Transhumanist Collective1. I assume you already know what this concerns, Doctor?”

  Tyresa shrugged. “Is it a response to my job application?”

  Sojawotz piped up. “Don’t be facetious, Jak,” he said, looking at Tyresa down his nose as was his custom. As usual, he crumpled it up, making it seem like every odour in the galaxy was offensive to him.

  Ju-Desh was unmoved. She held up the slate. “Judging from this, writing job applications may very well be in your immediate future.”

  Tyresa thought better of the smart remarks. Ju-Desh could be maddening at times, but she commanded respect in the department. Maybe some of it was even deserved. Plus, the old sow was technically her boss.

  “Professor,” began Tyresa, “all I did was take a—”

  “Unauthorised entry into Collective territory,” read Ju-Desh from the slate. “Trespassing on a planetary body belonging to the Collective.”

  “Oh, come on,” she protested, “they’re not doing anything with that planet, what’s the harm?”