Debatable Space (43 page)

But I failed. The existence of the backup Beacons invalidated all my work. All that sacrifice was utterly in vain.

So I had to take the biggest gamble in a life of gambles. With the power of my thoughts, I unleashed my robot microbes, which
were contained in an unexploded bomb casing buried in the Quantum Beacon.

Then, networking from the chip in my head across Heimdall, via the Kornbluth Beacon, I sent a mental signal to the other concealed
packages of robot microbes I had painstakingly been seeding for decades across inhabited space. One of them was buried in
the body of the Commander of the Illyrian Beacon. I had inserted it there nearly fifteen years previously, after meeting her
at a social gathering, and firing a concealed compressed airgun pellet into her spleen.

There were at least a hundred other people infected with my robot microbes scattered around the Universe. For years I have
been planting poisoned nano-bombs into the bodies of the Cheo’s administrators. And all of them died when I sent my mental
signal out: ATTACK. The pseudo-Bugs then replicated at astonishing speed, eating and destroying everything around them – metal,
plastic, and flesh. I have no idea how many other humans were killed by the micro-monsters, until I send my counter-signal:
SELF-DESTRUCT, PLEASE.

And then, just as I had planned, Earth’s computers ordered the destruction of all the Beacons. Earth itself was safe – I have
never been there, and I have never managed to plant any robot microbes there. But in their paranoia, the Earth Humans have
burned every bridge and road connecting them to the rest of the inhabited Universe. They are entirely isolated.

But my fear now is: can I control my Doppelganger Bugs? And can I destroy them? I had programmed them to self-destruct at
a mental command (SELF-DESTRUCT, PLEASE) from me. But what if they have evolved to a state of mutiny, and cannot be told to
commit suicide? With their self-replicating capacity, and their total immunity to any form of weapon or any other physical
threat, my robo-Bugs could swamp and devour all humanity. And, of course, because the Beacons are down, I would never know
. . .

I explain it all to Lena. Then I open a briefcase. I take out a small cylinder and carefully open it. Inside is a single invisible
microscopic robo-Bug. I transmit a mental signal: AWAKE.

Within seconds a black swarming mass has appeared on the table. A few seconds later, the black mass fills the air. I try to
focus, and give the mental signal to self-destruct.

I cannot focus. My thoughts are a whirl. Lena’s face fills with horror as Doppelganger Bugs start to swarm around her. They
rest on her skin, her hair, her nostrils. And still, I try and I try to focus, and I mentally utter the words that will cause
them to be obliterated: SELF-DESTRUCT, PLEASE.

I feel nothing happening. Nothing… happening… My heart starts to spasm.

“Fucking do something!” she screams at me.

I cannot speak.

The Bugs have covered her entire body now, she is a black mummy with suppurating flesh. They are crowding into her mouth,
they are overflowing from her ears. She tries to scream but the Bugs are blocking her throat. I panic, and try to pluck the
Bugs from her mouth. But they merely swarm and enter my nostrils, and cover my body too. I feel Bugs forcing open my eyelids,
gathering on my eyeballs. I try to brush them off me but they are legion, my body itches. My mind is in a state of total panic
but I try again and again to focus . . .

. . . and focus…

. . . and focus…

Then the itching stops.

The Bugs aren’t moving. They are dead. I frantically wipe my eyes, my hands, sweeping myself clean. Clouds of dead Bugs fall
to the ground. Lena chokes and vomits out vile black-specked vomit on to the floor. She is shuddering with fear, pounding
her body with her hands to shake the Bugs free. I know that all her memories of being flayed are swamping her, and her skin
still itches with the memory of the crawling evil microbes.

I shout at the room computer to switch on a blast of cold water. Lena and I stand beneath the cold water, feeling the dead
Bugs being swooshed off our bodies. I pick dead Bugs out of her hair. They crumble in my hands.

“It’s worked.”

Her smile is wavery, and fearful, yet infinitely relieved.

Flanagan has explained everything. We salute his genius, and his guile, and his relentless courage over many years. But we
curse him, too, for not telling us what he’d done just a little sooner. While he was off fucking that fucking bitch, we were
all steeped in total despair, expecting the imminent end of humanity.

Bastard. He likes his little joke.

We’ve boarded the Kornbluth Beacon, and found the eerie residue of the crew, eaten and reduced to slime. The crackling sound
underfoot is the only residue we find of the dead robo-Bugs. We fumigate the ships, and send the slime and the crackle out
into the emptiness of space. We surmise that the same thing has happened all across the Universe: the Bugs have self-destructed
following Flanagan’s signal.

Flanagan is utterly confident that his plan has worked. The Beacons are gone, the robo-Bugs are gone, and humanity is saved.

And so we savour our triumph, the salvation of the entire human race. Except… except…

Except, in fact, victory feels like shit. My many appalling and traumatising defeats have been so much more enjoyable.

And I also—

Why does it feel so bad!! Why…

We had a huge party. It was magnificent but…

Fuck!

I feel so alone.

This is great. It’s everything I ever dreamed of. But…

It’s like a great big knife coming from the skies and cutting the connection between your right cerebral hemisphere and your
left cerebral hemisphere. That’s how it feels. To me. How does it feel? To you?

Flanagan tries to butter me up at the celebration party. “I should have told you, Brandon,” he says, “what my plans were.
I trust you so much…”

I don’t fucking care. Yeah yeah yeah, future of humanity, yeah yeah yeah. So fucking what?

Because the real tragedy of what has happened is this:

The Universal Web is no more.

The instantaneous network of communication between the three thousand or so inhabited planets is gone. The effortless and
immediate access to the music charts, the books charts, the reviews, the gossip columns, it’s all gone. No more Earth TV.
No more of the shows that I have loved so much –
Penny for Your Thoughts, Enemies in Love, The Last Holocaust, Life in Hell, Death Island, Beelzebub and Trish
and a hundred others. Sol system drama and comedy is without a shadow of doubt the best in inhabited space. And, despite all
the horrors and the persecutions and the genocide and the rapes and the deaths of small infants caused by Sol system’s corrupt
regime… I will miss those shows. How could I not? I will now have to wait a hundred and fifty years for the next episode
of any one of those TV programmes. And so I will never again be
current
. I am backwatered.

Which doesn’t matter of course. The most important thing is that we have liberated humanity.

The hell it doesn’t matter!

What will Diane say, when she learns that Roger has had a sex change during his time in therapy for paedophiliac offences,
in
Roger and Diane
?
I have to know
. I cannot wait a hundred and fifty years to find out. How will those two gay restaurateurs in Amyville cope when they have
to share a raft across a whirlpool with a former Las Vegas World Champion Wrestler? I have to see it!
I ache with anticipation of experiencing the embarrassment and absurdity of it all
.

My brain is going to shrivel too. What are the latest developments in multi-dimensional superstring theory? Is it really the
case that each one of us carries a million universes with us in every particle of skin? Is that an exaggeration? A solecism?
A mathematical cul de sac?
I absolutely damn well have to know!

But I cannot know. Not for a century and a half, at the very least. At one stroke, humanity has been parochialised. I can
no longer send emails or vidmessages to friends who live hundreds of light-years away from me. I have no further access to
the seething hubbub of ideas that makes the Universal Web the greatest scientific forum known to man.

I am an island. We are all islands. Much has been gained – but something has been lost.

I mourn the something. It matters to me. I regret none of what we have done – but I know that I regret the consequence.

I am alone.

“I am leaving,” Alby tells me.

“Why?”

“Your work issss done. You will now decline and die. Your adventuring dayssss are over.”

“Not necessarily.”

Alby considers my statement.

“One lasssst adventure, Captain Flanagan?”

“One lasssst adventure,” I tell him, in gentle mimicry.

There is a long, flickering silence.

“Then, with your permissssion, I shall sssstay and watch… !”

Kalen is brushing my fur. She yanks and tugs at the knots, and in a series of long gentle sweeps, she turns my angry Loper
mane into a smooth silky flow.

“What will you do?” she asks.

“Settle on Kornbluth, I suppose. The DRs are all deactivated. The humans will need help getting used to life without the Earth
Beacon. I could help in that.”

“I thought I might go home.”

“To your home planet? Persia?”

“I need to spend more time with my people.”

“Your people are scattered through space. Besides, you aren’t sociable.”

“They are my people!”

“Cat people hate other cat people. It’s a well-known fact.”

“Except when we’re in heat.”

“You’re lucky. You can easily pass for pure human.”

“Why would I want to?”

“Fair point.”

“Just because I haven’t got fur and a tail like you. Doesn’t make me one of
them
.”

“Hey, don’t be racist.”

“I can smell the desire on you.”

“Can you?”

“Pure humans can’t smell emotion as we do. They exist flatly. They can’t smell, they can’t even see the future.”

“You can see the future?”

“I can see
a
future.”

“Does it involve me?”

“Intimately.”

“Are you in heat?”

“No. But I’m not a slave to my biology.”

“Ah. Right. You realise I may scratch?”

“If you scratch, I’ll bite.”

“Brush a bit lower.”

“Like this?”

“Now stroke my fur.”

“Like this?”

“Like that.”

“This bit isn’t furry.”

“Oh that’s nice. Oh! Oh yes! Now, let me stroke
you.”

She unzips. I touch her.

“Ah! Ah! Ah!”

“Is that good?”

Miaow.

I am wallowing in self-pity and rage. He sees my expression, and smiles his superior, arrogant smile.

“Why the sour face?” Flanagan asks me.

“I’ve just been thinking back,” I say. “On our time together. All the lies you’ve told. You’ve kept so much from me.”

“It was the only way.”

“We were meant to be working together. I was your leader.”

“Of course.”

I glare at him, angrily. “You’re a lying bastard manipulator. I was never your leader,” I tell him.

“No.”

“That was a sop. To keep me happy. I gave orders to the pirate crew. You gave the real orders when my back was turned.”

“Yup.”

“You’ve played me for a fool.”

“Pretty well.”

“And the sex?”

“What about the sex?”

“Was that another sop?”

“It would have been tactless to say no to you. But hey, I enjoyed it.”

“You ‘enjoyed’ it. Ah.”

“Yup. It was great.”

“It was ‘great’. Faint praise.”

“It was fabulous, Lena.” He smiles at me. In his roguish way.

I slip off my dress. I stand before him naked. I can see the gleam in his eyes. I do have
some
effect on him. He reaches out and tries to touch me, but I won’t let him. I gesture for him to undress and he does.

We stand, a few feet apart, both naked. He is erect. I am magnificent. But I see a faint trembling whisper on his lips. He
is already thinking ahead to what he is going to do after he’s fucked me.

I hit him in the chest. His heart stops.

Flanagan gurgles and sinks to his knees. I stare into his eyes and see fear and longing and hate.

I strike him again and his heart restarts. Then I mount him.

We fuck. He is full of the crazed frenzy that is so typical of those who have died and been brought back to life. He is a
man possessed, a man redeemed.

Afterwards, he trembles in my arms, but I keep my fingers on his manhood. Every time I squeeze he has another orgasm. He has
no idea how I am doing this and it makes him fearful.

“How was it?” I ask.

“So so,” he tells me. But his voice is trembling.

“Flanagan, I think I love you.”

“I doubt that,” he says. He looks faintly shifty.

I touch him, he orgasms.

“Flanagan, I love you.”

“So you said,” he replies, coolly.

I touch him, he orgasms.

“Flanagan, I love you,” I tell him, in tones of honey mixed with bile.

“I fucking love you too!” he screams. And orgasms again, and again, and again.

I roll off him. He’s lying of course. But mission accomplished; I’ve bent him to my will.

I get up and dress.

“You can stay a while if you like,” he murmurs. His bare chest is ripped raw where I scratched him with my nails.

I leave.

The citizens of Kornbluth welcome us as their saviours. They have a parade that spans several hundred miles, with banners
reading “Freedom!” and “A New Start!” It’s highly flattering.

I know that all across the Universe similar scenes must be taking place. But I long to know for certain. Like Brandon, I miss
the Universal Web. I miss the community of humankind.