Debatable Space

by Philip Palmer

  Then, when the second edition of my book was published, sales went through the roof and my fortune doubled. It helped that I was now a semi-glamorous figure – a “consultant to the UN Police Authority”. It helped, too, that by this time I had gained a few pounds – enough to stop me looking like a starved librarian – and changed my dress style. I’d become, almost, sexy; the book was a massive hit; and I became rich.

  And I kept working on my gadgets. I was one of the first to improve the smart contact lens data-carrying capacity; and I was a pioneer of attempts to create wireless connections between remote computers and the smart lens’s “brain”. I did the same with the hearing aid. I purchased a massively expensive subvocaliser, which allowed me to access computer programs via signals sent from my earpiece – by simply articulating my requests subvocally.

  And I worked out at the gym. I had my breasts non-surgically boosted – not excessively, just enough to give them a sensual curve and an exciting nipple flourish. I took a melatonin implant to shed the freckles, and acquired a pleasing all-year-long golden glow. During the last few years of working with Tom and the team, I was no longer a pale, skinny nerd – I was a sleek, bronzed, busty nerd. For me, the psychological difference was immense.

  Then, after the squad disbanded, I had my heart attack; and when I recovered consciousness, I insisted on having a smart heart installed, instead of a biological pig’s heart. The smart heart was made of bioplastic; it automatically regulated and monitored buildups of deposits in the arteries, and it had a phenomenal pump capacity.

  Tom came to see me in the hospital – but capriciously, cruelly, I wanted nothing more to do with him. I could tell he was hurt – I could see the pain sag through his proud body. But I felt, you see, different. I was a new woman. Tom was a part of the old Lena; so I cut him out of my life.

  And then, a few months after leaving hospital, I started training. I ran, I lifted weights, I did yoga to relax, I made my body my temple. Before long I became fit; then very fit; then frighteningly fit. With this new heart, I could run a mile in three minutes, and not be out of breath. My physical strength was increased twofold, because of the increased efficiency of oxygen flow in my muscles.

  And with my new heart, I knew that I need never fear heart attacks or strokes. Microbe-sized ionised probes in my bloodstream were analysed each day by the heart, and any irregularities broadcast to a medical computer. Heart and artery problems could be solved long before they actually became problems.

  The new heart cost me 2 million euros. I bankrupted myself to buy it. But then, of course, I wrote another book, based on my ideas about emergence, but now refocusing all these ideas into a self-help manual. Naturally, I wrote it just for the money; and it made so much money. The book was called You Are God 2, and it featured photographs of me clad in Lycra, outrunning athletes.

  As a result, I became a sex goddess, and an internationally famous self-help guru, the ultimate Before and After Makeover Person.

  With the money I made, I was able to fund my ongoing process of self-renewal. Some of the techniques I tried were quasi-experimental; I became a guinea pig for the Anti-Agers. And so, at the age of fifty, I had the body of a thirty-five-year-old. At the age of fifty-five, I looked like a thirty-year-old. And by the age of sixty-one I had the body of a gorgeous, hot, seductive twenty-five-year-old.

  I became a founder member of the Nematode Society, devoted to promoting pioneering research into how to reverse the ageing process. The trick is to realise that ageing is not a natural process; self-renewal is the natural process. (Think of the skin, which sloughs off layers and then grows afresh every day of our lives.) But through a process of natural selection, which of course favours reproduction over survival, organisms have evolved mechanisms that hinder the self-renewal and regeneration of the cell. To put it another way: as human beings, we have “death genes” that program us to degenerate and die. It’s Nature’s method, if I may be whimsical, of clearing the garden to make way for new crops.

  But if we isolate these genes, and replace them with cell-renewal genes – the Perpetuity genes, as they are now known – the body itself becomes able to regrow limbs and even brain cells. In a perfectly regulated Universe, I always idly thought to myself, the human being would be like a worm – so that if you cut a man in half, both halves would regrow into fully formed human beings…

  In practice, it doesn’t entirely work that way. If you lose a leg in an accident, it’s much easier to buy a new one from a lab than to grow a new one of your own. There are sects that doggedly insist on doing things the Natural Way – they have ceremonies in which they lop off fingers and even arms and then wait decades for them to regrow. But, in our busy consumer-led world, it’s easier by far to purchase over-the-counter limbs, eyes and ears than to, as it were, do it yourself.

  But the Perpetuity gene still has a vital role to play; through a series of coded messages distributed throughout the body by RNA, the gene replenishes and regenerates internal organs, it eradicates cancer, and it keeps arteries clear.

  It cures baldness in men too. And that, if I may say so, is such a boon.

  To continue: I wasn’t, of course, the only one to be taking advantage of anti-ageing technology. Many others were doing the same; my point here is, I was the first. Or at least, one of the first. One of the pioneers.

  I am now nearly a thousand years old, subjective elapsed time. I still have the body of a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old. I am the third-oldest human being in the entire Universe. And the other two, trust me, look weathered and tired.

  I’m the only one. The only one to be so old, and yet look and feel so young.

  I created Heimdall.

  But none of those fucking bastards ever properly acknowledged it.

  It’s the same old story. It happened to me in academic life time and again. When I reorganised the university library system, creating an online database of unique fluidity and versatility, I was thanked, curtly, for my administrative efforts. But the creative kudos all went to the head of IT. In the official history of the university, it was his name not mine that headed the folder on “IT Revolutions”.

  When I was at school, I always came second in History. Not because my essays lacked the necessary rigour or originality. It was because my nearest rival, Clarissa, had charisma and gorgeous hair and perfect skin. I once swapped one of my essays for one of Clarissa’s, on line; and my essay with her name on it got a score fifteen points higher than my previous best.

  Why is that? Why do some always get the credit, while others get downgraded? Do I have some special knack, some sign that says, “Undervalue me”? How come, to get back to the matter in hand, that in the history of the Heimdall virtual bridge, I’m the fucking Trotsky?

  Not that I’m bitter.

  I admit, of course, that the scientific groundwork for Heimdall was laid down by others. I’m not the Einstein, or the Dyson, or the Fermi, or the Lopez. I was, by that time, in my fourth or fifth major change of career, the elected President of Humanity. For nearly a hundred years I was the most powerful person in the Human Universe. I created peace, harmony, understanding.

  And Heimdall.

  Heimdall is, of course, a quantum artefact. Its essential principles relate to the well established concept that a quantum state in one part of the Universe can affect a quantum state in another part of the Universe, simultaneously and without any passage of time.

  Scientists call it – I feel you flagging here but please, bear with me, this is the very structure and essence of the Universe we’re talking about, so if you fail to grasp this paragraph you might as well be, frankly, pond slime, or a laboratory rat – the principle of wholeness, or entanglement. Which means that whenever two systems have at some previous moment interacted (or entangled), their description is tied together no matter how far apart they may subsequently be. And a datum that is true of the one system, will be true of the other system also.

  But since all the Universe originated in
a single near-infinitesimal singularity – in its pre-Big Bang golden idyll – every part of the Universe was at this very earliest moment entangled with every other part. And that connection persists, despite the subsequent expansion of the Universe. It’s like twins separated at birth and raised in different countries, who remain empathetically or even telepathically connected.

  And so quantum theory allows an amazing loophole to the law that says nothing can travel faster than light. The exception says that i nformation can be conveyed instantaneously, whatever the distance involved, if it’s information about a quantum state between two previously entangled quanta.

  But to get any value out of this hallowed principle of physics, you have to be able to manipulate the quantum states on both sides. Not by much. You just need the difference between Quantum State A and Quantum State B. Which is the difference between 0 and 1. Which of course is the basis for a long-distance digitised computer connection, capable of communicating information instantaneously.

  And so, once you have your two quantum state controllers in place… distances vanish. An email sent in Australia will reach Africa the very instant it is sent. It won’t be quick, it won’t be fast; there won’t even be a millisecond of time elapsing. It will be instant. And so it becomes as easy to send an email from Australia to Africa as it is to send one from London to the other end of the galaxy.

  And thus, as a result of these discoveries, the Universal Web becomes possible. Video phone calls can be made between planets, without even a momentary delay. And all this is made possible by the “quantum state manipulation nano-computers” which were christened, by me, Quantum Beacons.

  The snag is that there’s a huge amount of work involved in setting up this means of communication. The near Beacon is always on Earth or in the Earth system, but the distant Beacons have to be literally flown through physical space to the desired remote location. In a metaphorical nutshell; the telephone wire has to be hooked up at both ends.

  I was, I have to admit, one of the first to realise the great value and potential of all the decades of difficult theorising into the field of quantum communication. And I believe that the construction of Heimdall was the greatest accomplishment of my Presidency, tarnished only by the memory that the scientists and the explorers were given all the credit, whereas my role was… sorry, sorry, I should move on.

  To continue:

  In order to create Heimdall, a fleet of spacecraft was built. (This was before my time, I concede.) Each ship was massive, and constructed with total redundancy. Nanocomputers were installed to do the work; but every system had a backup, every backup had a backup. And each ship was crewed by five hundred potential space colonists, with a cargo of human sperm and every conceivable seed and animal embryo in deep store.

  The first vessel in the fleet was called the Mayflower. Tragically, all five hundred crew members died in deep space, after a collision with a dark-matter tornado. This was a phenomenon we hadn’t even known about until it killed the world’s finest men and women. The names of those five hundred are engraved in a plaque in New York Plaza, and in my heart. And in the history books.

  But even though the crew was dead, the computers carried on sailing the spaceship. On and on it went on its long journey. Using state-of-the-art fusion engines, it could reach speeds of almost two-thirds light speed.

  After fifty years the Mayflower stopped. Its cargo of human embryos was unfrozen and carefully grown by robot nannies. Seeds were germinated and planted. A Quantum Beacon was built by the pre-programmed robots and nanobots. And, once it was installed, instantaneous messages could be transmitted between the Mayflower in its new home, and Earth.

  And after that, vidphone and webcam links were created. Robots were then remotely built in humanoid form, complete with touch and olfactory sub-programs. We could now see everything the robots could see, and feel what they felt, the moment that they saw or felt it. Which means: It’s as if we were there ourselves. Suddenly, space had shrunk… with the help of virtual technology, a citizen of Earth could find him or her self on an alien planet.

  This first Quantum Beacon planet orbited a star which I named Asgard, after the home of the Norse Gods. And the virtual link that connected us was called Heimdall, after the Rainbow Bridge that connected Asgard with Earth.

  And meanwhile, all the time, other colony ships were landing. Other Beacons were being built. And the map of space was filled with the dots of human settlements…

  It took four hundred years for Heimdall to become the masterpiece it now is. Quantum Beacons are dotted across all of known space, and the virtual Rainbow Bridge that is Heimdall allows instant communications between all the regions of humanity.

  And, all those years ago, actual control of the first space colonies was literally in my hands, and in my eyes. With the help of a virtual bodysuit connected to robot bodies on the colony planets, I could walk on alien soil. I could move tractors across arid plains. I could choose the music that played on the colony’s intercom, I could devise menus for the children who I was growing there. I could do anything!

  My focus in those early years was almost exclusively on the colonists of the Asgard star system. I named their planet Hope, and it became my joy. I studied them, and encouraged them, and help shape their society.

  But I was at pains to be sure that the new colonists did not ever become resentful of their “master” in a faraway land. The settlers of Hope were my children, not my slaves. I became the perfect parent; all-seeing, all-protective, indulgent, and immune to insult.

  And much to my delight, the new colony of Hope turned into a wild and dangerous place. It was the first civilisation in human history to have only one generation, grown from embryo by robots with unerring care. All the babies were babies together; they all went to kindergarten together; and they all graduated to primary school level together. And then they became teenagers together; they were thirteen together, they were fourteen together, they were fifteen together.

  And thus, the children grew into adulthood. Every inhabitant of the new colony had the same birthday, the same emotional and mental age. And, knowing that the Quantum Beacon was a constant source of information and wealth, a virtual safety net, they ran riot together.

  For five whole years the colony of Hope was a drug and sex and rock and roll Utopia. No useful work was done. Wild oats were sowed. The “accelerated maturity” process became a joke, as the colonists spent the years between fifteen and twenty either stoned or drunk or delirious with sex.

  Well, good luck to them I thought. I myself, I must concede, had the dullest-ever teenagerdom. So, by proxy, I was now sowing my own wild oats. Through vidcam and virtual-reality links, I followed the lives of my children, I watched them get spaced out, I watched them fuck, I watched some of them play suicide games that tragically ended their infinitely promising lives. I watched, but I didn’t meddle. I merely waited until my children grew into maturity.

  And then I gave them independence. With independence came power; with power came a sense of responsibility. We still kept, through our robots and virtual-control programs, a grip on the mineral and energy wealth of the new colony. Solar panels orbiting Hope’s sun pulsed energy that fuelled its space factories and telescopes. And spaceships travelling down the Beacon’s path carried valuable raw materials back to Earth on a regular basis; the first cargoes took sixty years to arrive, but after than, a cargo ship arrived every three months. All this allowed us to run an Empire with infinite resources, infinite power.

  On Earth, we had everything we could possibly desire. So why be greedy? Why dominate, why control, why bully? Why not let the children of Hope have their total freedom?

  Why not?

  Why fucking not?

  Book 3

  Flanagan

  “There she is, five sectors off our port bow.”

  “I see her.”

  “She looks ripe, Cap’n.”

  “Fire the flag.”

  We shoot a flare into sp
ace. It unfurls and creates a holographic skull and crossbones. Our way of saying: let’s do this the easy way, guys, or else.

  The merchant ship begins to tack. At the same time, a flotilla of missiles is dispatched towards us.

  “Fire the microwarships.”

  We fire a cluster of metal ants into space, creating a wall of chaff that sends relentless interference patterns into the path of the missiles’ guidance systems. One by one the enemy missiles explode, well short of our ship.

  “Prepare to engage the grapples.”

  “We’re prepared,” says Brandon.

  “Well fucking well engage them then.”

  “We’re too far away.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’m ready to accelerate into position, Cap’n, if you’re minded to give that command.”

  “I took it as read. Accelerate into position, Harry.”

  “Aye aye Cap’n.”

  We accelerate into position.

  “You humansss should sssuit up, perhaps?”

  “Indeed. Suit up, people.”

  “Your leadership leaves a great deal to be desired Cap’n.”

  “Less of the insubordination or I’ll clap you in irons.”

  “Ironssssss?”

  “Fire our warning shot.”

  Harry fires a missile. It ploughs straight through the debris of their wrecked missile defence systems, and crashes through the bow of the merchant ship.

  “ That was a warning shot?”

  “It must have been caught by the wind,” Kalen says, snidely.