“I know it’s pretty hard to get your head around this stuff but I can prove it to you, you know.”
“Can I beam her up to the space patrol ship and take her out to the asteroid so she can see I’m telling the truth?” Bruce asked the MPU. Even though he had hardly thought about Ngaio in years Bruce was suddenly desperate to have her approval.
It can’t do any harm, the MPU replied. It was monitoring Bruce closely – it was a little concerned about some of the physiological changes Bruce seemed to be undergoing. His blood pressure was rising and his heart rate increasing for no apparent reason.
Bruce, is there anything wrong?
“Mind your own fucken business and leave me alone for a minute, will you. Oh, and by the way, we need some nappies for the baby. You must have some kind of template for them on the space ship?” The baby’s bum was wet and warm in his hand.
“How?” Ngaio asked bluntly. “I don’t believe you. I know something strange is going on here but I can’t put my finger on it. Bruce, it’s simply impossible; you can’t expect me to believe you have been to an alien planet and one of their spaceships is in orbit around Earth. I could believe an asteroid is going to pass close by the planet but anybody could predict that, it happens all the time,” she added dismissively.
“Well finish your cup of tea and we’ll go and get some nappies, and then you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
“And where is he from?” Ngaio asked about the baby dangling on his knee. “What else have you been up to? I heard you had got married?”
Bruce’s parents had been unusually discreet about little Bruce, but everyone locally knew Bruce had got married and a whole lot of the guys from the rugby club were going to surprise him at the reception, as it coincided nicely with a trip to the Sevens in Las Vegas. There were a few comments on Facebook about Bruce’s behaviour at the Sevens, and his wife was a bit of a cow. But nothing that should be taken too seriously. However, nobody had mentioned a baby.
Although Bruce felt pretty comfortable with Ngaio, even with Mrs Pratt sitting at the table with them, he was somehow a little embarrassed about touching on his short and ultimately failed relationship with Sue. His account had mostly skipped over the part of the story that would have explained how little Bruce came to be.
“It all seemed to be the right thing to do at the time,” Bruce replied a little lamely. “But it isn’t now.”
He was not keen to elaborate any further – he found thinking about the relationship with Sue was something of an itch he did not want to scratch at the moment while being interrogated by Ngaio. He would get enough grief from his parents when they turned up.
There was one thing he could do, he could prove to Ngaio that he had an alien spaceship at his beck and call. It was something tangible he could show her, then fill her in on the rest of the details he had omitted as he got the opportunity.
Bruce handed over little Bruce to Mrs Pratt. The baby’s backside was noticeably damp now, and the poor wee mite was probably a little uncomfortable. Though you would never know it the way he seemed to be happily gurgling away to himself. Bruce would have to get the MPU to sort out the nappy and baby food subject sooner rather than later – he really didn’t want to make a trip to town to shop himself.
He then decided it would be better to take little Bruce with them, so he retrieved him from the still almost catatonic Mrs Pratt and ordered rather theatrically, “Beam us up, Scotty,” as he reached for Ngaio’s hand across the table and hoped the MPU knew what he was talking about otherwise he’d look pretty stupid, very quickly.
He needn’t have worried; milliseconds later, before he’d had time to let Myfair and Leaf know where they were going, they found themselves on the bridge of the patrol ship.
Ngaio looked around in bewilderment. She had not expected this! “Where are we?” she asked quietly as she reached out to the console to steady herself. “You weren’t pulling my leg then?” she muttered as the monitors filled with a bird’s-eye view of the Earth below.
“Well, do you believe me now?” Bruce asked jovially.
A flap opened from somewhere behind her and a small robot rolled out holding something looking remarkably like a disposable nappy, in one of its small metal limbs. It stopped in front of Ngaio, almost expectantly holding the nappy out towards her.
Ngaio looked at Bruce.
“Don’t look at me,” he said, handing her the baby. “I don’t know what to do with the bloody thing,” he lied.
“How about milk or something for him as well?” he asked the MPU. He meant some form of baby food. Somewhere in the MPU’s vast database it must have a formula to produce food suitable for an infant. The mushy, tasteless synfood would probably do.
“I think you were a little bit vague about a few things, Bruce,” said Ngaio as she took the baby and the nappy from the robot and went about cleaning the baby’s backside while Bruce began his story over again, filling in a few more details. However, as he talked he began to wonder if all was as it seemed. In some ways the story did sound too good to be true, too fantastic. It felt like someone or some entity had been nudging him onwards on a predestined course. At times he sensed some other presence at the edge of his consciousness, like a lurker in an online forum, something quite different from the MPU – a presence that felt rather more organic in origin. Bruce struggled to explain to himself the difference between the MPU and this other entity; it felt like the difference between talking to a parrot, who learnt by rote, and a Rhode’s scholar.
There was nothing immediately malevolent about this lurker, yet he did sense it was keeping an eye on him for some reason. Mind you, Bruce did have a rather active imagination at times, and this presence could just be a figment of it.
Bruce related to Ngaio how he had essentially been kidnapped by a group of Skidians and taken back to their planet in order to assist them to develop new ways to produce food. Skid was a highly developed planet in terms of technological capability, far more advanced than Earth. However, for some reason the synthetic food plants they relied on to feed the entire population of the planet and its dependencies were failing and the Skidians had been unable to find a solution. If they couldn’t solve the problem, they would face a devastating famine beyond anything they had ever experienced. They were desperate and the MPU, the sentient computer program running the infrastructure on Skid and managing the lives of all Skidians, had gone offline, its processes running autonomously. Left to their own devices a bunch of Skidians had set a course for Earth and kidnapped a few people to help them out, of whom only Bruce and Sue had survived.
The whole story sounded pretty unlikely, even to Bruce’s ears. Even so, events had unfolded – with a little embellishment – mostly as he had explained, and the fact they were standing in a spaceship gave weight to his story.
While the farm Bruce had established flourished, the programme to find an alternative food production process, which the farm was the flagship for, had ultimately proved unsuccessful because few Skidians and none of the senior leadership team were prepared to become physically involved in producing food; none of them were prepared to get their hands dirty. Not one of the senior Skidians Bruce dealt with ever seemed to understand or believe – or maybe conceive was more the right word –they would ever personally be impacted by a famine so there was no senior level engagement until it was too late. None of the Skidians could comprehend the concept of hunger and that it was a very real possibility, for the simple reason they had never experienced any form of deprivation in their lives. Except towards the end when Inel, Myfair’s father, had shown some real interest.
Bruce could explain how he and Sue had met and lived, and by all accounts conceived little Bruce, though now he could not explain why this had happened. It all seemed so long ago. At the time they were preparing to live in Skid for the rest of their lives without any hope of ever going home, so getting together was the logical thing to do.
He could now explain how he and Sue had someho
w been transported back home, albeit with some vague notion all was not well, or an important component of his life was missing, the result of an incomplete brain wipe. Then somehow, coincidentally, or maybe not, he had managed to get himself to a position where he could make contact with Sue in her hometown of Portland. He realised now this could not be coincidence; something must have been driving him in that direction.
It suddenly occurred to him that Cop, the old shit, might have had something to with it. Bruce thought the revelation he had a talking dog might be going a bit far with Ngaio for the moment. Having his own spaceship was probably enough information for her to process for the time being. The talking dog was for another day, along with the additional admission that he had been partially responsible for driving the President of the United States insane. Or at least for tipping him over the edge.
He went on to explain about the asteroid and how Myfair and, by default, himself and Sue had come to the attention of the American authorities at the same time some astronomers had discovered a large asteroid hurtling directly towards Earth. Once the American authorities had deduced that Myfair had a space patrol ship they were keen to get their hands on it, in the hope it could deal with the asteroid, and all the Skidian technology they could grab in the process. He also explained how he was connected to the MPU. He struggled to articulate that and, yes, he really did have a sophisticated computer connected wirelessly with his brain, and this machine had indicated it had some kind of scheme in mind for him. But he didn’t know any of the details of this plan.
“So I’ve shot home for a few days, but I think my position here will be untenable pretty soon,” he added. “But I wasn’t sure where else to go.” Which was enough information for the moment, he decided.
“And you expect me to believe that?” Ngaio asked incredulously.
“Well,” Bruce began and then laughed. The whole story sounded pretty far-fetched even to himself. “Well we’re on a space patrol ship having this discussion, aren’t we?”
Ngaio had finished with the nappy and handed the boy back to Bruce. As she stood, a service unit shot out of wall, scooped up the discarded nappy, proceeded to wipe the floor with a cloth-like attachment that sprang out of a compartment in its torso then scuttled back into the wall once it had completed its task.
The first service unit was immediately replaced by a bigger unit holding a container with a nipple on its lid in one of its robotic limbs, full of a white fluid, which it offered to Bruce.
He took the container, checked the temperature of the fluid by pressing the nipple on the back of his hand then licked it. It tasted okay to him and didn’t feel too hot for the baby.
“This will be OK for the boy?” Bruce asked the MPU.
Of course, replied the MPU, almost sounding affronted at the question.
“How about taking us out to check on the asteroid?” Bruce asked out loud.
“Are you sure it’s OK to leave those other people at your house while we take off?” Ngaio asked.
“I don’t think they can get into too much trouble, can they?”
“Mum and Dad might start to wonder where I am if I’m away too long.”
“There is that. How long would it take us to get out there and back?” Bruce asked the MPU.
We’re already there, Bruce! the MPU replied, almost with a hint of exasperation, implying ‘do you think I am stupid?’ Of course I have taken the time to anticipate a requirement to travel out to the asteroid.
Bruce frowned, the machine was somehow developing a set of human-like emotions. It sounded, for all the world it was tired of stating the obvious to the slower flesh-and-blood entity in its care.
The image on the screens changed, and Bruce saw at once they had pulled up beside the asteroid. In the few days since he had last seen it there had been some big changes on the surface. The areas adjacent to the sites where the rockets had been attached were now surrounded by more structures like prefabricated building modules stacked on top of one another.
“What the hell’s going on here?” he demanded in amazement at the sight before his eyes. “What are you building here, mate?”
Six
It took the MPU an unusually long time to respond. Bruce was left with the unsettling impression its response, or more correctly lack of response, was remarkably similar to what he would have expected from a human being asked a question they were uncomfortable answering or were simply trying to evade. Or a Skidian for that matter – especially one who had been surprised beyond their ability to comprehend. Or maybe one who was just being bloody-minded and difficult, which was another common, human-like Skidian trait.
Bruce felt his blood pressure rise as he sought an explanation for the scene before him and the implications this development entailed. As he did so he conjured up a vision of the MPU standing beside him, absolutely speechless. The answer, when it came, did not really surprise him in the least.
I don’t know, the MPU finally admitted. I programmed the service modules to build sufficient infrastructure to produce fuel for the rockets. But I didn’t commission this, this complex. There is something going on here I don’t understand.
“You don’t say. So if it wasn’t you, then who was it?”
The MPU failed to venture a response, staying stubbornly silent.
Then, without warning, icons flashed brightly in his field of vision then one by one blinked once or twice as though some kind of computer reboot was underway, then faded from view again.
“Now what?” Bruce muttered to himself. He had just got used to the icons, in the same way someone eventually gets used to floaters in their eye, and their sudden disappearance was particularly disconcerting. “What the fuck is going on?” he blurted out loud.
Ngaio gave him an odd look and was suddenly less assured of herself and started to fear for her own safety as it occurred to her Bruce was now concerned about the situation. Something was not going to plan here.
Bruce felt the first hint of real panic begin to surge through his veins. Was the MPU broken? If it was, what did that mean for his immediate future? Things could get a bit grim if they were stuck on a malfunctioning spaceship tethered to a rogue asteroid that had suddenly sprouted an industrial suburb on its surface. Even worse, what might happen if they did get back to Earth and he found himself exposed, without the protection of the MPU? This was starting to look like a typically Skidian shambles. Everything would seem to be going along okay then there would be an almighty cock-up nobody had seen coming and before you knew it, most of the population would be wiped out by an industrial accident.
He checked the main controls, which he didn’t really understood. Myfair’s tuition and basic flight training had been pretty minimalist to say the least. After all, if you had an internal wireless connection to a supercomputer at your beck and call, the manual controls were a bit of an irrelevant redundancy – until you needed them. Until the supercomputer had a fit and decided it was not going to play any longer or the connection to the cloud died. Besides Myfair’s own knowledge of how the systems worked was actually pretty limited and involved knowing which sequence of controls to press and swipe and how to select a destination from a drop down list.
Bruce cursed himself for not paying more attention to the more detailed functionality of commanding the ship. He could set a rough course, although it now appeared the ship would only follow the heading if the MPU was actually in agreement with it. He could clearly still order food, control the outside feed to the monitors and knew enough to understand the environmental metrics, which to his untrained eye looked okay for the present. None of the read-outs were glowing red or orange, at least. But try as he might, he could not get the ship to budge from its position orbiting the asteroid.
The MPU remained stubbornly offline, not responding to any vocal or subvocalized command or enquiry. He actually felt quite silly in front of Ngaio, almost pleading with a computer to answer him. It was actually fucken embarrassing to have the bloody useless piece
of shit software package let him down like this at the very moment he was trying to impress her. Which was something more important to him than he had realised initially.
“Bruce, I’m scared; what’s going on? Why are you talking to yourself?”
“I dunno.” He had not yet fully elaborated the extent to which he and the MPU were connected to each other and the way he communicated with the AI via some form of wireless technology. There was probably a fancy term that might describe the process more accurately, but this was the best he could do for the moment. “The ship has a voice command capability. Seems to have gone offline for some reason,” Bruce added, trying to reassure her and trying to mask his growing concern at the situation.
“What do you mean gone offline?” she demanded. “How can a spaceship go offline?”
Then, after it seemed to Bruce the MPU had been offline for ages, even though the elapsed time was probably only a minute or so, a universal message icon popped up in the menu bar at the bottom of his field of vision. He ordered the message to open and read the text that scrolled downwards.
“OK,” he sighed with relief, well almost relief. In some ways the message was not reassuring in any sense. But at least it was better than complete silence.
Do not be alarmed. I am undergoing a thorough systems check. I must have authorised the infrastructure development on the asteroid but I have no record of this, so I am running a deep diagnostic test to determine the reason for this gap. The MPU paused again in a very human way, searching its mind for the right words.
The Lifeboat Page 23
