[03] Elite: Docking is Difficult

For my mother, who was smart enough to buy me a ZX Spectrum instead of a Commodore 64. Nobody cares about your SID chip, losers. TEAMCLIVE4EVUR

GOLLANCZ

LONDON

FED UP seeing the other guys and gals walk off with the BEST of EVERYTHING? Tired of your stupid JOB, of being overtaken by your peers, of lacking the
willpower
to get the things you want … of being HALF ALIVE?

I know how it is BECAUSE I TOO was once an
under- achiever
. Hard to believe that of Cliff Ganymede – Best Selling Author; Decorated War Hero; Clinically-Recognised Supertaster; Zinc Magnate. But it’s true. I dithered. I put stuff off. I failed to KNUCKLE DOWN. That’s because I didn’t know I was Elite. Now let me tell you a secret:
everybody
can be Elite. You’re already ELITE! You just don’t
realise
it yet. Elite. Say the word out loud with your
mouth
. Think about what it really means.

E
ach one of us has unlimited potential.

L
ife is there to be L-I-V-E-D
¹

I
isn’t a dirty word – put yourself first.

T
ime is now!

E
ach one of us has unlimited potential. (It bears repeating.)

Right at this moment you’re at ‘A’ – sitting in your squalid habitation pod, lank hair stuck to a doughy, waxen face, wondering if the hole in your shapeless sweat pants is even bigger than the hole in your heart. Whereas I’m at ‘B’ – smelling of expensive shower gel, a Braben
^TM
Real-Wool jumper enveloping my healthy, husky body, and a ready supply of minced ortolans flowing direct from the brushed steel taps in my fully-featured kitchen. The question is: how do you get from A to B? The answer: via my three-day immersive ocular implant seminars, available on a host of topics to suit all needs. Popular examples include:

Find your inner Elite: Self Marketing & Neurotoxins

Find your inner Elite: Human Resources & How To Make Veiled Threats

Find your inner Elite: What Babies Can Teach Us About Innovating Agriculture

Find your inner Elite: A Guide To Dating Hot Unhappy Singles In Your Area

Find your inner Elite: Why Are These Changes Happening To My Body?

Find your inner Elite: Gas, Our Invisible Friend

Find your inner Elite: Conquer Social Media with Pie Charts

Remember: there’s nothing
mostly harmless
about settling for less than you deserve.

Cliff Ganymede

¹
Now say the word ‘LIVED’ out loud. Think about what this word really means too: Love Interesting Valued Exciting D-A-Y-S!
²

²
‘DAYS’ is another word worth saying out loud. Again, stop and ponder the actual meaning: Demand All Your S-U-C-C-E-S-S-S!
³

³
Why not say ‘SUCCESSS’ out loud as well? You’ve probably already guessed this one: Seize yoUr Chances – Chances Equal Success So S-E-I-Z-E!
⁴

⁴
Even if you’re getting quite tired of saying words out loud, summon up one last burst of energy to think about what the word ‘SEIZE’ really means: Strength! Endurance! Intelligence! Zest! E-L-I-T-E!
⁵

⁵
(see above)

The President banged the dais with his brand-new faux-mahogany gavel and the entire population of Gippsworld – a hundred and nineteen citizens, tightly packed into the municipal centre’s half-built holo-squash court – stopped arguing about pigs and methane for a moment and gazed up at him expectantly.

‘Comrades – these are difficult times,’ said the President, fixing the air above the front row with his most empathetic middle-distance stare. ‘We find ourselves in the depths of a harsh economic winter. We find ourselves in a bind. And as the beady-eyed ice vultures of financial ruin circle overhead, we find ourselves at a crossroads.’

The President’s demeanour was serious and solemn, so his audience nodded and pulled serious, solemn faces themselves, even though this wasn’t news to anyone. A couple of the more easily impressed Gippsworldians murmured appreciatively about the ‘vultures’ line and said how good it was that the new president had a nice turn of phrase.

‘Here on Gippsworld we hold a number of unenviable records. The lowest GDP for thirty parsecs. The most relentless precipitation. Smallest circumference for an inhabitable planetary body. Highest lead content.’ The President paused. The crowd, perhaps expecting something a little more upbeat, shifted about uncomfortably. ‘But I put it to you that we can also boast some other, better, though admittedly less tangible, statistics. Pluckiest population! Most indomitable spirit! Highest levels of vim and pep! I’m sure you can think of more besides.’

‘Lowest rates of literacy?’ shouted out Anatoly, who ran the Spaceport’s cafeteria.

‘Not that.’

‘Highest infant mortality?’

‘No, that’s another bad one. My point is: we have not been dealt a great hand in the galactic poker game. But we can still play that hand like it was aces, or at least a pair of sevens or something. With that in mind, I’d like to present a short explanatory film I’ve put together, for which I also did the music.’

Somebody pressed a button and in swish KatzenbergKolor the film beamed out above the audience’s heads, pointlessly detailing the planet’s brief and underwhelming history that everyone had already learnt about back in primary school. It showed familiar three-generations-old footage of Gippsworld’s discovery by the Hegarty Mining Conglomerate. It showed a cheery, oily-haired businessman planting a flag. It showed the excited headlines from the time:

A new gold rush out on the wild frontier!

The little planet with a BIG future!

Hegarty mining stock heading for the moon!

A Leading Scientist Of The Day appeared on an antique newsflash. ‘Here is a world you might not give a second glance,’ he said, polishing a model of an atom and beaming at the camera. ‘A world so pint-sized you can wang a stone across it, if you’ve got a good arm. Yet it is blessed with a treasure as scarce as it is sensational. A sparkling deposit of Gooberite buried deep beneath the surface mud, like a clumsy cook’s wedding ring lost inside an unappealing lasagne. Valuable – indeed vital – Gooberite! Our prayers have been answered.’

‘It’s something important to do with the manufacture of air-conditioning units,’ said people in the know.

‘It’s the main ingredient of rusks,’ said others.

‘I think they use it in face-creams,’ said a few more.

‘An element as rare as hen’s teeth!’ boasted the Hegarty Mining Conglomerate’s press office. ‘Obviously beak dental-augmentation has come a long way in the last few decades, and that claim isn’t what it used to be, but even so,’ they added, in a slightly smaller font.

It was a resource no rational person could do without, everyone agreed on that. Amidst universal fanfare, plans for New Vladimir Putingrad were drawn up, a city and spaceport designed to match the boundless riches that would soon be flooding out of the ground. Work began on drilling a mineshaft through a mile of Gippsworld’s tough, super-dense lead crust. A giant diamond drill-bit was shipped in from the carbon planet Rho Cancri V. The urbane, polo-necked presenter of the hugely popular
Architectural Exercises In Narcissism
show was on hand to record all the triumphs and innovations. A thousand breathless articles banged on about ‘the raw ingenuity of man’ and ‘the towering resourcefulness of our modern industrial age’ and ‘the sheer Ayn Randian wonder of it all’.

Then, three months into the project, Lansbury Five – newly discovered in the adjacent star system – turned out to have reserves of Gooberite as well. There were a few key differences between Lansbury Five and Gippsworld. The seas on Lansbury Five didn’t turn your epidermis into a powdery residue. The sand on the beaches was actual sand rather than millions of microscopic parasites. It had better TV reception. But the most significant difference was that Lansbury Five’s Gooberite, instead of being lodged in tiny quantities a mile underground, was piled up everywhere in great, big, easy-to-access mounds. Anybody equipped with a sunhat and a spade and a decent-sized bucket could collect as much as they fancied. A new set of headlines popped up.

Gippsworld weather turns out to be massive pathetic fallacy.

White elephant, man’s hubris: the usual shambles.

When mixed with rendered animal fat, Hegarty mining stock makes for effective draught excluder.

More footage, set to less jaunty music than before, showed work on the New Vladimir Putingrad mineshaft grinding to an overnight halt. Investors chalked it up as a handy tax write-off. Engineers, used to an itinerant life, found some other planets to build giant walls or mega pipes or super sewers on. Only the obstinate, the insane, and the otherwise unemployable stayed put. They sat around in the dirt and discussed their diseases and their humanities degrees and their syndicated life-style columns and pretty soon a hundred years passed by.

‘Ever since that fateful day, our little planet has had to rely on just two natural resources: our indigenous pigs,’ – the President had to pause again, as at this all the pig farmers in the room cheered, whilst all the methane farmers booed – ‘and our methane.’ At this point all the methane farmers cheered and all the pig farmers booed. Ninety percent of Gippsworld’s inhabitants farmed either pigs or methane and they didn’t rate each other highly. The methane farmers thought the pig farmers were uppity. The pig farmers thought the methane farmers had womanish hands.

‘But margins for these products are low, and getting lower all the time,’ the President continued, graver than ever. ‘Following current trends,’ – a sad-looking graph flashed up – ‘our way of life will be unsustainable in a few short years. Yet we have not been idle in trying to tackle this crisis. No indeed. As you may be aware, we recently spent our world’s entire pension fund on the construction of a gigantic advertising hoarding, which – to be frank – hasn’t really panned out.’

The Gippsworldians looked miserably up through the hole in the municipal centre’s roof to where the three-mile-wide screen hung, static and black, stuck to the side of an enormous zeppelin sat in futile geostationary orbit. Half a billion credits, but it had never been switched on. Corporations had shown little interest in what the newly formed Advertising Ministry’s expensive brochures described as ‘
a unique mega-wattage marketing opportunity; your chance to really connect with people, day or night
’. The corporations cited the lack of anybody on Gippsworld worth connecting with; a flaw that the population grudgingly admitted seemed sort of obvious in retrospect. A few companies had said they’d be happy to use the giant floating advertising site so long as they didn’t have to pay anything. When the Gippsworldians asked what was in it for them, the companies had just shrugged and muttered something about ‘useful exposure’.

‘So how to put Gippsworld on the star-chart?’ asked the President, tapping his nose in a conspiratorial way. The film flickered on, and this time a slide flashed up above the room which read ‘WHERE NEXT FOR GIPPSWORLD?’

‘The solution, my friends, is
tourism
. It’s going to be our number one new growth industry.’

A couple of the audience stuck their hands up. ‘But why would anybody want to come
here
?’ said Misha, a young pig farmer with a pleasant, open face. There was some general nodding. Even the methane farmers agreed that this seemed like a salient point.

‘A very good question,’ said the President. ‘And that’s exactly why I called this meeting. I thought we could have a collective brainstorm. Throw a few ideas at the wall, see what sticks.’

Another slide shimmered overhead. This one said ‘IDEAS’.

‘So, who wants to go first?’

It took a while for anybody to volunteer, because Gippsworld was a taciturn place and few of the inhabitants fancied themselves as public speakers, but eventually Yuri, who was in charge of keeping the plasma generators clean, cleared his throat.

‘Over the years quite a few depressed locals have killed themselves by jumping into our famous never-completed mineshaft,’ he said. ‘So perhaps we could encourage tourists to come here to do the same. Establish ourselves as a suicide hot-spot. Set up a stall, sell them farewell knick-knacks.’ There was a good deal of excited chatter about this, until someone pointed out that ‘farewell knick-knacks’ weren’t really a thing. Probably there was a boring moral question as well, but the real clincher, Misha argued, was that a half-dug hole on an out-of-the-way rock, even if it had briefly been a
celebrated
hole seventy years ago, wasn’t going to be able to compete with the galaxy’s more glamorous suicide hotspots. Nobody was likely to jump down a mineshaft when they could vaporise themselves crashing a rented starship into the rings of Isis Nine, or burn their faces off diving from the thousand-mile span of the Sapphire Bridge into the magma lakes of Cassiopeia.

And so they moved on.

A couple of the more unbalanced citizens thought it would be good to commit some sort of atrocity. Planets where atrocities had happened, they reasoned, always got crazy amounts of tourists. But nobody could agree on what kind of atrocity would be best. The pig farmers suggested some kind of mysterious mass murder where all the methane farmers were – regrettably – found dead in their beds. The methane farmers were in favour of the planet having a brief, unfortunate flirtation with fascism leading to all the pig farmers being hung from lampposts.

Since that discussion didn’t seem to be going anywhere, someone else suggested they could try to pretend the mineshaft was haunted, maybe dress it up with a skeleton or two. They already had quite a few spare skeletons from the aforementioned suicides. A haunted mineshaft seemed like a decent draw, but this time nobody could agree on the best kind of haunting. Unimaginative opinion was split between ‘inevitable ghostly child wreaking revenge for bullying’ and ‘predictable eldritch curse from building on a hitherto unknown civilisation’s dumb sacred burial ground’. So that idea got put on the back-burner as well.

Dmitry, the air traffic supervisor, proposed they could become famous for being the planet with the Most Beautiful Woman In The Galaxy. But everyone knew that
that
was just Dmitry’s way of trying to flirt with Olga, the co-air traffic supervisor, and also that a) Olga wasn’t interested in Dmitry, and b) she couldn’t really pass for the most beautiful woman in the Galaxy, even though she was perfectly fine looking, because she had that weird thing she did with her eyebrows.

Finally, somebody suggested they could ‘have a parade’ on the grounds that ‘people like parades’. Somebody else declared that the worst idea yet. The person whose idea it had been said that kind of criticism wasn’t in the spirit of brain-storming, then the other person told him what he could do with his brainstorming and his blue-sky-thinking whilst he was at it, and before long the population of Gippsworld were having a brawl and smacking each other with sticks and it didn’t matter how many times the President banged his gavel and so the meeting was adjourned.

The hover-truck skimmed back through town towards the Bulgakovs’ pig farm.

‘I think the President made some very good points,’ said Misha, gazing out of a rain-streaked window as they sped past the rotting foundations of the Olympic-sized velodrome and the vacant lot where the opera house would have gone. His father snorted.

‘He is idiot dreamer,’ said Misha Senior.

‘What about the graph? That graph seemed pretty convincing.’

‘Graphs are for methane farmers and simpletons.’

Misha watched as the unfinished city gave way to claggy, monochrome fields of mud. ‘I’ve been saying for ages that we should consider branching out from pigs,’ he persisted. ‘We could do a part-exchange on the
Malkovich
, get something a bit nippier, a bit more space-worthy, do some proper long-haul trading. You know: in commodities that people actually want to buy. Commodities that don’t make them throw up all the time. You could take it easy down here. Kick back, learn space golf or something.’

‘Putin give me strength. This is one of your “projects”.’

‘I’ve given it a lot of thought.’

‘You mean you design logo for company.’

‘I’ve not
just
designed a logo,’ said Misha. ‘I did a tagline too.
Bulgakov Trading –
Outstanding in our Field
. Next to a picture of us on our farm. Farm/fields. It’s a play on words, you see?’

Misha Senior went on staring at the road ahead. ‘Your great-grandfather farm pigs. Your grandfather farm pigs. I farm pigs. You farm pigs. Though mostly you do not farm pigs. Mostly you sit on fleshy arse, eating my cereal.’

‘You’re not seeing the big picture! You need more
vision
, dad. What’s so great about pig farming anyway?’

‘Pig farming is hard life. Second highest number of industrial accidents after mining. Good, honest work.’

Misha rolled his eyes.

‘It’s not like they’re even pigs,’ he muttered.

The pigs were not
technically
pigs. So far as anyone could tell, they were ambulatory plants, brainless, bone-free, stump-legged Triffids. A few passing botanists had theorised that the fact Gippsworld’s dominant life form relied on photosynthesis indicated the planet’s weather had, in some distant past, been less unremittingly dismal. For millennia the plant-pigs had been locked in an arms race with the sky, getting more and more efficient at extracting energy from whatever watery sunlight made it through the remorseless cloud cover, like drunks magically locating the alcohol in a bathroom cabinet. Now, if you shone a bright enough light source at their hyper-black skin they’d overdo it and explode in a gloopy shower of vegetable matter. On otherwise boring evenings, kids would sneak into the farm and try to blow the pigs up with a torch for a joke. It was the sort of fact that made it into the light-hearted ‘and finally’ column of a few nature journals, but no academic could be bothered to do much fieldwork on a place like Gippsworld, so that was as far as studies had gone.