The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (6 page)

My own desk happened to be next to the only window in the office. Unfortunately, although this was merely a coincidence, my colleagues noticed and they stopped speaking to me.

They never spoke to me very often anyway, so it hasn’t made a lot of difference to my life. But I don’t feel I can sit on the sofas, and people visit me only when they have to pass on some work.

My desk is quite near the lift, which is the first voice-activated one I have ever encountered. There are no buttons to press, just a small metal grill and when someone gets into the lift a voice comes out of the grill and says, ‘Speak the number of the floor into this grill slowly and clearly. Zero is the number of the ground floor.’

Sometimes the lift’s voice is the only one that speaks to me all day. The voice is female, nice and gentle-sounding, and I enjoy listening to her.

On the first day in the new office I tried out the lift. ‘One,’ I said and it worked. The journey was smooth, the lift’s motion almost imperceptible.

I became curious about the lift’s abilities so I decided to test it, ‘Two. No, perhaps I mean three. I’m not sure.’ But it managed to ignore my attempt to mislead it, it just picked out the essential information and delivered me to the correct floor.

The managers were pleased with my seating plan. But the next piece of work that they gave me is somewhat more demanding, I must write a report with a definition of outer space. I’ve been working on this for weeks, trying to understand the views of all the different experts. When I get stuck I’m able to stare out of my window at the city, at all its roofs and metal buildings with the sky above always busy with planes and clouds.

The managers and the Minister need to know where outer space is so they can regulate it. All I can say for certain is that outer space is a long way above this Government department. When I’m working on the report I can picture myself floating around freely up there, a long way away from all this ordinary stuff.

Monday morning and on the way to work I treat myself to a café latte with hazelnut syrup. When I get into the lift I feel like I don’t really want to go to my desk yet, so I tell it, ‘A half’. It starts to move and then slows to a halt in that secret noman’s land that always exists between floors. It stops there for precisely the same length of time that my colleagues used to spend politely laughing at one of my jokes, and then without either of us saying anything it delivers me to my own floor.

All day as I sit trying to work on the report I can see the lift out of the corner of my eye. Its doors open periodically to reveal its inner metallic space, and I can hear my colleagues telling it numbers in slow, solemn voices like children in primary school learning to count.

I still haven’t finished the report although my managers are waiting for it, the Minister is waiting for it, everyone out there is waiting for it. But I don’t know what it will say. None of the
numbers make sense to me. I spend my day gazing at Excel spreadsheets, and when I’m not doing that I stare out of the window and try not to imagine things crashing out of the sky onto the people below.

Last month a Russian satellite fell to earth in the Outer Hebrides and every news site around the world had pictures of the remains of the dog walker (and his dog) being scraped up off the machair. After that there were calls for something to be done. Laws to be passed.

In order to regulate something, the Government has to know what it is or at least where it is. And nobody can agree on precisely where normal, everyday space stops and outer space starts. My report is supposed to make the definitive pronouncement, but each expert that’s been consulted has a different opinion. So the report is still imaginary. I have a title for it, and headings for the different parts of it. I’ve even typed my name at the end of it. The rest of it is just blank white space.

At lunchtime I’m looking forward to escaping for a bit. Talking to the lift is the first time I’ve spoken today, so I test it again, ‘One minus one.’ My voice is a bit croaky from lack of use, but the lift doesn’t hesitate. It’s clearly able to do maths, and so it takes me to the ground floor.

That afternoon, there’s another email from the managers. Parliament has been waiting for the report for so long that they suspect there’s been some sort of cover-up, and they’ve summoned me to give evidence to the Outer Space Committee. I’ve never heard of this committee before, perhaps it’s made up of politicians bobbing around in spacesuits.

When I was young, I saw ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and I fantasised about being an astronaut. After that, whenever I felt lonely at school because the other children weren’t talking to me, I’d imagine being all safe and snug inside my spacesuit and doing a walk outside my rocket, completely surrounded by space. That thin layer of the spacesuit would be the only barrier between me and infinity. But now I’m stuck because
I can’t find the line that I always assumed was there. Perhaps there is no obvious barrier and it’s more of a gentle thinning out of daylight and air to darkness and vacuum. Perhaps each astronaut must learn how to travel upwards through the prosaic clutter to beautiful emptiness.

I feel agitated by this summons to the committee, so I leave my desk and wander over to the breakout area. Even though we haven’t been in this office longer than a few weeks I’m dismayed to see that the sofas have already acquired a layer of food stains and crumbs. They look thoroughly used. And when I return to my desk a few minutes later, I can tell that someone’s disturbed it. The stack of papers has been ruffled, the array of biros is out of kilter, my coffee mug has been moved. I look around but everyone appears to be hard at work. No way of telling who has been here, disturbing my space.

I can’t work anymore, I have to leave the office. In the lift I become calmer as I experience its slow but sure motion down through the building. I place my hand on the wall of the lift. It feels warm and it’s vibrating slightly, making me think of a sleeping body curled up next to me in my bed. I’m capable of imagining such a thing.

The next day there is nothing on my desk. No paper or biros or in-tray, even my computer and keyboard have gone. All that’s left is a smooth, flat surface to contemplate. Perhaps the managers have moved me to another office, or perhaps it’s an extension of yesterday’s disturbance. There’s no way of telling. It’s sort of restful, in a way, to sit at an empty desk when everyone around me is working.

But after a few minutes I get bored. I go over to the lift and I stand in the middle of it, not particularly near the grill, so that I have to speak in a loud voice and all of my colleagues can hear me, ‘Pi.’

‘Pi,’ the lift’s voice repeats softly.

Pi is the beautifully endless number that can never be completely known. Perhaps it’s odd to stand in the metal cube
of the lift and be reminded of pi, but there is something about the unreal voice in the lift that is better than any other voice I have had to listen to in my life.

The doors shut. I lean against the wall and feel the lift’s tiny judder travel through my body as it tries to calculate my command. It creeps from approximation to approximation in search of mathematical perfection without once complaining. I know it will take an eternity to calculate pi. I can relax in here.

The competition for immortality

The fat man stayed squatting right in the middle and didn’t ever move, while all around him the skinny people were rushing around so frantically that some of them bounced off the edges of the space. Their job was to bring the fat man biscuits which he ate quickly, spilling crumbs everywhere. The skinny people pecked at these crumbs which gave them more energy and so they rushed around even faster, and brought the fat man more biscuits and he distributed more crumbs.

In fact, the visual output of this program was actually quite crude, the skinny people weren’t much more than lines of black pixels. The fat man was just a circle with a mouth, he didn’t need limbs or eyes. The graphics weren’t important, they weren’t the essential part of the program because the real output was invisible, a database stored in the computer’s memory.

But to make it more entertaining she’d managed to superimpose a photo of their boss’s face onto the fat man, and all the lab-people were gathered around the screen and laughing because the program was a perfect analogy of life in the department. The ‘biscuits’: the academic papers, grant applications, conference proceedings, press releases and so on all had to be fed into the boss. And in return everybody else (the lab-people, the coders and the admin assistants) just got crumbs of grant money.

It felt odd watching her colleagues laugh at something she’d created, because she didn’t interact with them much on a daily basis. Her office in the computing section at the top of the building always seemed too far away for the lab-people to reach from their home in the basement. She wasn’t sure exactly what they all did down there, but she knew some
of it involved cutting up brains with a machine that looked disturbingly like a bacon slicer.

So as a farewell present, and partly because her grant was due to run out and she’d be leaving this place soon, she’d adapted one of her codes and added in the boss’s photo as an offering to the lab-people. And here they all were, gathered around a laptop amongst the workbenches and bottles of liquids and glass dishes and fridges and centrifuges and white coats and bits of nameless machinery. Down here she could smell a rich and complex perfume of chemicals. Sometimes this smell rose up past the entrance to the lab but it never made it beyond the first floor. The floor where she worked just smelt of old shoes.

This was what she did for a living, she created computer simulations in which virtual animals she called ‘beasties’ could move around and eat food. If the beasties ate too much food it would run out and they would starve, so their numbers seesawed up and down as they cycled through periods of feast and famine. The latest innovation that she’d added to the beasties’ world was to give them another type of food, so they now had grass that needed to be cultivated and meat that needed to be hunted. But although there was plenty of food, the beasties’ behaviour was rather chaotic and they didn’t seem able to feed themselves very effectively. They moved in random directions, as if confused by what was on offer. She always pictured them as lumbering animals that worried about sudden loud noises or hidden predators. Even though there weren’t any noises or any predators in the code, the beasties might have a whole hidden mental existence. After all, they did in her imagination.

And when she left this department, she was going to have to leave them behind. Even though she’d written the code that created the beasties, it was the intellectual property of the department. They weren’t really hers. As the lab-people
laughed at the pixellated biscuit-eating she felt a pang of nostalgia and she wondered how the beasties would cope. There was still one more variable that she wanted to introduce to their world before she left them for good.

The lab-man standing next to her by the laptop, who grinned at her sometimes when the boss was being excessively verbose in seminars, suggested they all go to the pub. She’d worked here nearly three years and only been invited to the pub a couple of times. So she ran to get her coat and when she found them again they were halfway down the street, with their arms linked like some long chained molecule. In the pub they shoved up to make space for her so she was able to settle down next to the man, and a few drinks later he spoke to her, ‘Do you ever compare your computer simulations to the real world?’

‘Other people do that.’ The beer was slipping down smoothly and the man’s hand was resting very near to hers on the sofa. She fancied she could feel the warmth of it.

‘Have you ever looked through a microscope?’ he asked. ‘At real things?’

She shook her head, she didn’t do microscopes.

‘Come and have a look. I’ll show you a whole new world.’

She said she’d think about it and then she fell quiet again, she wanted to listen to some more of the lab-people’s talk because they were all so easy with each other, it made her feel comfortable too. They were talking now about the annual ‘Fruit Fly Olympics’ where different strains of fruit flies competed for the honour of being set free in the boss’s office.

‘Come and look tomorrow,’ the man spoke to her more quietly and more insistently than before. Then his hand came down on top of hers as if they’d both planned it, and maybe they had.

Once, she had written a code about sexual reproduction and it didn’t have any graphics because nobody but her needed to analyse the output, and anybody else who was interested in it could use their imagination. But later that night as the
man was shedding some of his cells inside her, she ran a finger around the swirls of his ears, and she examined the colours of his eyelashes. She looked at the way his fingers were splayed out on the bed, as if he were trying to grasp something just out of reach. The more she examined him, the more complexity she could find. Perhaps that’s what real life was, endless complexity and all of it beautiful.

The next morning it was raining so hard that when he took her hand and led her into the lab, water washed down the windows and it looked like they were walking under the sea. The air felt murky and textured and ripples of light swayed across the floor and the benches as he showed her the alcove where the microscope stood. ‘This is Cyclops,’ he told her.

‘Cyclops?’

‘It’s only got one eye.’ He stood behind her as she peered down the tube and she could tell he was smiling into the moist darkness of the room. But all she could see was the enlarged reflection of her own eye looking back up at her, the lashes grossly magnified, the pupil as black as ever. She tried for some time until she had to give up.

Later that morning she made the final planned change to the code. She introduced a genetic mutation that affected the speed of the beasties so that some of them could move quicker than others.

When the code was up and running, she continued to work on job applications for various labs and institutes around the world. She imagined her life branching out across a map, and wondered what would change and what would stay the same if she moved somewhere else. Then the code stopped, the beasties had all died unexpectedly early. She adjusted the parameters of the mutation and started the code again, trying not to think about how many beasties had died in total since she started work here.