I guess this means we spend most of our time in the ‘now’, rather than wasting energy thinking about what might happen in the future. The innocence of this is just great: it means we can enjoy ourselves in a way that our parents can’t truly share, because their existence is clouded by responsibility, duty and the harsh realities of everyday life — like tax, food shopping and saying “no” to their children at least eighty-seven times a day.
But at the moment, the future (or lack of it) looms as a rather large obstacle on my horizon, and it appears the innocence of childhood (as it was such a tantalisingly short time ago) is gone forever. My (our!) future is what matters and I reckon you’re with me on this. So that’s the prize I focus on.
Sitting at my dresser, Quark pouts into the mirror, pushing my lower lip out in an exaggerated grumpy face. “Why the long face?” he says. “There is no need to get upset about it. No need to be down in the dumps. This is exciting! And entirely impersonal. I attach no feelings.” Has my own voice ever sounded so obsequious? I sound like the slimy Uriah Heep from Dickens’ David Copperfield, all cloyingly insincere.
“No feelings?”
“None at all,” Quark confirms, still wheedling.
“So you don’t care about me — at all?”
“Sorry?”
“You’ve lived within me, you have virtually been me for, what? — almost three weeks now.”
“Yes …” He’s not sure where I’m going with this. To be frank, neither am I, but I hope there’ll be an opportunity for something more than meaningless point scoring on the horizon. “You’ve got at least a vague impression of what it is to be a teenage girl. A human being. To be alive. To exist in a corporeal state … even though you haven’t really taken advantage of it,” I add, sotto voce.
“Yes?” He really doesn’t get it!
“And this has been, what — a waste of your time? You’ve gained nothing from the experience?”
“Well … ”
“Because if you don’t want to live my life, I have news for you: I DO! I love my life. I’m clinging on with everything I have.”
“Yes, I do see that! And that is precisely what we need to settle. Once and for all.”
Look — I’ve had issues with bullying, I’ve lived through my panics, and once I even scored only twice the required pass mark in a Maths test! But I know that compared to many, my life has been plain-sailing. And even in stressful times, I’ve never feared living before. Right now though, deep inside my tiny broken body, I’m too scared of dying to think much about actual living!
“I am freeing you from worry,” Quark pronounces.
“Huh? For a moment I’m too stunned to speak. It’s like he’s been listening in to my thoughts again. “So, what … I’m free? Just like that? You’re setting me free?”
“Yes indeed. I am liberating you. Undoing the shackles that bind you to this lonely, isolated planet.” Quark sounds almost breathless, so touched is he at his own philanthropy.
“But not really free? This is just another way of ‘doing me a favour’ by eliminating me, yes?”
“Your life here is not preordained. You are on Earth by the merest accident.”
I sigh. “That’s why some people believe in something greater than themselves — God or whatever. And I agree: our presence is wonderful. Fantastic. Totally mind-blowing.”
“Yet your existence is precarious and you are making a bit of a mess of it.”
“Well, I’m not: I recycle, I shower instead having a bath, I’m vegetarian — unless planet-munching space monsters force bacon down my gullet! I do the best I can.”
“I am sure you do, Daisy,” Quark says, with a condescending smile and in a tone that is only ninety-five percent patronising. He may as well add, “there, there” and pat my head, except he’d look pretty silly sitting there, patting his own head! “And this is where I can help you.”
“Experts and scientists all over the world are looking for solutions. Everyone knows this, Quark. We need to find a balance between humanity and all the creatures that share our home, and I think — I hope — we will. But it’s our mess to sort out.”
“Then there is global warming. Deforestation. Nuclear weapons. Loss of habitats. Population growth.” He makes that hands wide movement, which, combined with the pursing of my lips, clearly means he rests his case.
Except he doesn’t, because no case goes under-egged with Quark. “You have no divine right to exist. And your run of luck will end at some stage. Humanity has all these grand plans, yet when it comes down to it, what are you?”
My turn to sigh. “A girl. A teenager; a human being —”
“No,” he interrupts, “I mean, fundamentally, what are the building blocks of your world? Your physical world, I mean.”
“Well, if you’re going to get all fundamentalist on me —”
But he simply talks over me again. Having the actual voice in our going concern, he does this whenever he chooses! Another of the many irritating things about my body-snatching space critter!
“You are a collection of cells and that is all you are. You have no more right to exist than an amoeba or a Gnexian rumblewoad.”
“Maybe,” I hedge (if you have any idea how I can answer and preferably disprove Quark’s statement, answers on a postcard, please), “but my cells coalesce in a very special way. I can think, I can have an influence on my planet’s future.” Or at least I used to be able to think and I very much hope I’ll be around long enough to be an influence. Actually, come to think of it, if I’m not around, there won’t be a future!
“Humans do not always act in the best interest of the planet.”
I inwardly glare. “Well, that’s hardly my fault, is it? You can’t take all of human history out on me. Besides, we’re changing and taking better care of our world now. We are sentient; we have consciousness. We have a conscience. We can change; you’ve lived as one of us, surely you know by now that we are way more than just random cells.
“And also — there’s no way you can say you’re eliminating our entire global population just to save the planet from humanity and return it to the safe-keeping of amoeba and ocean-dwelling protozoa! Don’t pretend you’re doing us — or the amoeba — a favour. Because you’re not. Let’s make that clear. It’s time to tell it like it is: you are a psychopath. You are the oldest and least wise so-called being in the universe. Don’t leave our planet in the care of single-celled organisms!”
There’s a pause. If we could have done, Quark and I would have either tried to out-stare each other or paced around the room trying to calm down and reduce the tone of our bickering. As it is, he just stares blankly back at my face in the mirror.
I try another tack. “Listen, Quark, can I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead, oh, wise and sentient being,” he says deliberately and with some asperity. Clearly, I’m not playing fair. I’m not rolling over and playing dead. I’m not making goo-goo eyes at his perspicacity. He is, once more, showing his true colours. He tries a hard stare, but I think he’s as tired of this as I am, and the glare lacks intensity and any real sense of menace. I think — hope — I’m wearing him down.
I imagine straightening my shoulders and pursing my lips as I simply ignore his sniping. “Be honest: in all the beings you’ve taken over — and slaughtered — have you ever felt so truly alive?”
“Well —”
“Or is it different this time? The experience, the feelings, the emotions, the … passion of humanity. Does it feel different?”
He shivers and tries to cover his discomfort by adjusting his position on the chair in front of my dressing table.
“Come on, Quark, you’re part of me, or I’m part of you — whatever: we’re practically related, so you can level with me. Break the habit of a lifetime and be honest.” Is that sniping too? Or is it out and out bitchy?!
“Beings have fought to live. Fought for their pitiful existence.” In the mirror, my eyes sh
ow a brief trace of regret, although whether at the loss of so many lives or their lack of fight, I can’t be sure. “But this degree of feeling, of emotion is … somewhat unsettling and disturbing,” he concludes, and my eyes look away from the mirror as if he can’t look me in the eye.
This is interesting! My emotions, my teenage angst makes him uncomfortable. That’s definitely something to file away for further reference.
“‘Pitiful’ you call me?”
“Yes,” he says.
“It sounds like you’re trying to distance yourself from your actions. From your responsibilities.”
“I don’t see it that way,” he says, defensively.
“Well, quel surprise as my French teacher would say! Why am I not surprised! I think you’ve been missing out, Quark.”
“Oh, yes, you puny little teenage human, and I guess you are just the being to tell a multi-billion-year-old entity exactly how they have been missing out?”
I think someone’s rattled his cage! “Funnily enough, I think I am. I’m just on the verge of life —”
“Verge of death, more like,” he mutters. “You were on the verge of life. But even had you lived, that life would have been a matter of a trivial few of your years.”
“Again with the ‘trivial’ — belittling and trying to demean what you can’t control; what you can’t put in a neat box.”
“I think I have you rather neatly boxed in.”
“On the contrary, it’s me who’s done the boxing-in, and you who got locked out. But we’re talking of your eternal lack of life, of —”
“Lack of what? Humanity? Hah! I am not human and I have no desire to be.”
“No? I guess not. Not full time, anyway. Don’t have the guts for it.”
“What?! Are you suggesting I should move in permanently and learn to enjoy living as a teenage ‘girl’? Become a young ‘woman’. Get a ‘job’. Live a ‘life’?” He actually says those words as if they’re in inverted commas, as if they’re unclean, outlandish and unpleasant. Yes, including ‘girl’ and ‘woman’ — this is the kind of entity I’m dealing with here! Yes, he’d top Unipol’s Most Wanted list (if such an organisation existed); he’s the universe’s ultimate psychopath, but that’s not all — he’s misogynistic too!
“Don’t worry,” Mr Misanthrope continues, “once I find a way into a being’s consciousness, or central nervous system, or brain, then I can take over. Take control.”
“And then?”
“Then I —”
“Yes, come on — say it.”
“I shut it down.”
“You shut down the brain?”
“Yes.”
“So, finally you’ve said it.”
“What?”
“Brain death. That’s the definition of the end of life. That’s you killing them. An ugly word, yes? Murder. That’s another ugly word. But that’s you finally calling a spade a spade.”
“A spade? What is the spade for?”
“It’s just a phrase, an idiom. But in your case, if you stuck around long enough, I guess you could use your metaphorical spade to bury them.”
Quark is silent.
“This is what you do. What you have always done.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why shut them down at all? Why not live a little?”
“I have experienced brief glimpses of life.” He pauses and, in the mirror, I see my eyes cloud and once more look away from my own reflection, instead staring down at my hands, tightly grasped in my lap. “But very few to be honest.” He sounds downhearted.
“Out of the billions of lifeforms you’ve taken over and … absorbed, you’ve never experienced anything. You’ve never seen a sunset through their eyes? Or caught the scent of a flower in bloom? Tasted a fine meal? Seen the look of love in the eyes of a parent, child or lover?”
“I have felt the lives of so many.”
“Have you? Have you really? Or have you just snuffed them out, like a candle. Have you truly felt what it’s like to be alive? D’you know what it’s to be alive at all? Or do you only know what it is to take life?”
“It never occurred to me before,” he whispers.
“In however many billion years it never occurred to you to stop the killing?”
“There was never time —”
“Quark, you’ve had nothing but time!”
“No. No-one ever fought back before. Not for long enough for me to get any sense of who or what they were. Always just fragments of memories, flooding past over a swirling torrent of abstract, jumbled rapids.”
I say nothing.
After a moment, he continues. “I saw flashes. Just glimpses of the beings they were. But I did not see how they went about their life. I did not know what they thought. And when I got that very brief insight, what I mainly saw was —”
“What?”
“Fear. Terror. Panic. Sorrow.”
Do I push the knife now? Somewhere deep inside … well actually, in the circumstances, right in here where I currently reside, I feel a stab of pity for Quark, for his lack of … what? Maybe just the tiniest degree of empathy that would have allowed him to cease and desist with this absurd genocide millions of years before the Earth even existed. But I can’t let this go. There’s a glimmer of hope for me here, I’m sure.
“You’re old, Quark, but you’re not wise. You don’t see life for what it is. You don’t appreciate its significance. Its many possibilities.”
All the while I’m talking, I’m thinking — I will make it through this. I must keep him talking, make him think, make him see what he’s doing. In my ever-shrinking space, I think … I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. And, if I say it enough, it might even end up being true. Yeah?
Chapter 40
DAISY SOUP
It rarely takes Quark more than one or two becomings for the momentum become so rapid that the end is effectively instantaneous. Blink and you’d miss a street, a city, a country, a continent, vanish into something rather less than dust before you opened your eyes again. Of course, in the time it took to complete the simple reflex of an eye blink, you too would be something less than dust … and you’d have missed the downfall of your entire civilisation!
(There’s probably a lesson here for us, but if we pause long enough to contemplate it, we may miss the end of our own planet and that would be a shame. Imagine standing at the Pearly Gates — should they exist — and overhearing the conversation: “Did you see that? It was amazing!” And having to admit that you were blinking at the most significant moment in the entire history of the planet … )
The pace Quark operates at is such that no being has ever had a genuine effect on him. None has changed him. In billions of years, not one creature has impacted on him at all.
And then Quark met Daisy Jacobs …
And this creature, this human being, this girl-child stopped him in his tracks. He knows the end is inevitable: she and all of humanity will become a glorious mass of space dust. But the impact she’s made upon him remains.
And Quark thinks he may have changed. He —
“What would happen if I didn’t believe in you?” Daisy interrupts his contemplation.
“What do you mean?” This time, Quark’s actually grateful for the interruption; he’s not given to self-reflection and the discomforting feelings it brings. Quark was unsettled right from the ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ in the very first contact with this young woman. She’d set him uncomfortably on the back foot. How this could happen when he controls over 99% of her body is beyond him. How can she fight him from a tiny bit of her brain, which she claims is a locked room (but is actually just a collection of ganglia and neurons)? She’s squeezed all she truly is as a person, at the most basic level, into that space. She’s kept her personality — and her attitude! And somehow stored it in that minuscule space. It’s baffling!
Yet her r
oom is just a square centimetre or so in the middle of her brain that she’s convinced herself is some kind of fortified castle! And in convincing herself she’s persuaded the rest of her brain — the majority, in fact — and all controlled by Quark himself, that the room exists. That it’s real. The very notion is beyond preposterous, yet she’s done it. She’s made a room and a highly effective lock, out of literally nothing except her imagination; and she’s kept him out of it for three weeks. Maybe there’s something in this ‘girl power’ she goes on about!
And she’s not just sneaky and tricksy, but she also talks. And talks. She’s trying to talk him into submission! She’s talking again now. Debating. Arguing the toss. Refusing to accept her fate. And always reaching out. Reaching further. Seeking to be more.
“Well, it’s a heck of a leap to accept that a singularity even exists in the first place. Let alone one that hoovers up innocent teenage girls. How can you expect anyone to visualise such a thing? No one will get a eureka moment and say ‘aha! Now it all makes sense: life is meaningless and I’ll get gobbled up by Quarky.’”
“I told you what I think about being called Quarky”.
“And I’ve told you what I think of psychopathic mass-murdering space entities, and that hasn’t got me too far yet, has it? Anyway, how many layers of reality would people have to break through to reach the conclusion that you do actually exist?”
Quark sighs. “Listen, Daisy, you have been lucky to have your moment in the sun. Now your luck has run out. Look up into the night sky and you will see the ashes of long-dead stars. And that is what you will be. You humans are merely a collection of atoms that briefly coalesce into an ordered pattern. And then break down.”
“You are such a ray of sunshine! And anyway, I’m not ready for oblivion yet.”
“There is nothing inevitable about your presence in the universe.”
“I know! And that’s what makes my very existence even more astonishing and miraculous!”
“Sadly, your future will be somewhat different to what you may have imagined.” A look skitters across Daisy’s features — a kind of distant cousin, three times removed, of sympathy. He tries his best, but empathy is a concept entirely — well, alien — to him. Billions of years as a psychopathic mass-murdering space entity tends to erode the finer points of the ‘do unto others’ parable …
Daisy Jacobs Saves the World Page 16
