No one knows if in fact such a thing is possible. But the fear of it is corrosive… And so, in a millionth of a second, the Earth computers analyse all the possibilities and possible outcomes and they reach a speedy decision.
The alien defence system is mobilised. Vast energy flares hurtle through space. Asteroids and space debris are incinerated. The Space Factory itself is in the direct line of fire; it is obliterated in less time than it takes a raindrop to coalesce.
Simultaneously, the Cambria Quantum Beacon’s defence systems are switched off. The energy flare hits with the power of a dozen suns, and the Quantum Beacon is entirely unprotected. We watch, on our screens, as the squat orbital space station that housed the Beacon vanishes in a flash of light.
The defence system continues to hurl its deadly rain into space, but it is on automatic pilot by now. The remote computer link has been severed. The Quantum Beacon is gone; the inhabitants of the Earth system now have no way of communicating with or controlling the planet of Cambria.
A second before the blast reaches us, all six of us are flipped out of the Cambrian system. Our DR bodies are left behind.
The Cambrian people are now alone in space. Earth can now no longer control its robot slaves, or even contact them. And, because Cambria is a relatively remote system, it will take a hundred years (their subjective time) for a spaceship of new DRs to reach them from the nearest inhabited planet. By that time, I hope, they will be prepared.
Finally, my people are free.
I have saved my world from an eternity of brutality, tyranny and oppression.
Hallefuckinglujah.
Book 7
Jamie
“All right Jamie, the ball’s in your court now.” Flanagan is beaming at me, his old Dutch Uncle routine. We are all suited up, ready for whatever hell will be thrown at us.
“Yobaby, how long we got?” On the console’s plasma screens I can see approximately. 78 million Corporation ships. We are completely surrounded. They are moving closer and closer.
“Oh, a few minutes.”
“Munchies.”
The Captain produces a bar of chocolate which I scoff. Lena is standing there, looking dazed.
“Give us a kiss sweetheart,” I tell her.
“Give him a kiss,” Flanagan says.
“As if,” she says scornfully, and Flanagan glares at her. She relents, and gives me a lovely kiss on the cheek. I swoon. I feel a little stirring in my trousers.
“Do I give him a blowjob too? This is a child Flanagan! I’m not a fucking…”
“I’m 121,” I tell her coldly.
“You made your bed, you fucking lie in it. You’re a child.”
She has a point. I sit at the computer. “Lena, can you fly this thing?”
Lena sits at the joystick. She overrides the “Orbit” control and fires the space station engines. “We can’t outrun Corporation warships,” she warns me.
“Just a little kangaroo hop will do.”
She fires the engines. We leap up in space. The warships start firing on us. They are spooked! I bet they didn’t know that the Quantum Beacons were all built in old colony ships, and are still fully functional spacecraft. The first missiles miss, but a second later we sustain our first direct hit.
I slip the CD-Rom into the Quantum Beacon’s computer. It boots up. The “Teleport” program begins. I map the codes manually, deleting and modifying to counteract the computer’s anti-virus programming.
“I know what you’re doing,” says Lena, with that faraway look in her eyes. Then she starts to smile. Then she gives me another kiss, a great big smacker this time, on the lips.
“Don’t distract him!” shouts Brandon with, I feel, a hint of jealousy. I’m beaming now, and bright red in the face. I look at the computer screen. “ACCESS DENIED” flashes up and I type in the override. I have a few seconds of pure genius.
Lena turns to the Captain. “This isn’t a suicide mission,” she says, marvelling. “You have a way out.”
“There’s always a way out,” says Flanagan.
“You can teleport? You can actually do that?”
“Not exactly,” says Flanagan.
“I created the program!” I tell her. “I’m a genius, I’m so clever! Munchie!”
The Captain gives me another chocolate bar. But I don’t touch it. Actually, I’m feeling a bit tired. I get that a lot these days. Mornings are okay, I always wake up with a spring in my step, and I love the way my mind hops and bounces around. I have the mental vigour of a ten-year-old, boing! boing!, my thoughts go so fast no oldie could ever keep up. Combined of course with the intellectual maturity of a man in his hundreds. Beat that, huh?
But the truth is, I’m starting to feel my age. I feel like Dr McCoy, in the original Star Trek, but stuck in this silly child’s body. I wish I were Jackie Chan, the 3D animated version. Then I’d be young for ever.
“Release the escape pod,” Flanagan says and our vessel rips in half. The bridge area becomes a liferaft, powered by massive fusion engines. The bottom half of the space station houses the Quantum Beacon. Our engines fire us forward, safely out of the way of the Beacon, then we shoot “up” into space, in the small gap between the Corporation warships. They aren’t expecting this, and our brilliant stunt buys us a few moments more of life.
The Beacon itself remains in its secure cage in the bottom half of the ship, the bit we have left behind. And I type in the final commands which instruct the Beacon to begin its teleport program. This is my masterstroke, it took me weeks, nay, months, to come up with this one. The world’s great scientists were baffled by this problem, but I found a way!
Because, you see, the laws of nature forbid teleportation. The Universe just won’t allow it. Hence, the colony ships, and the use of DRs. It would be much easier to walk into a booth in Manhattan and teleport yourself to a planet in the Crab Nebula. But that would violate every principle of modern quantum-relativistic-multiversal string theory, otherwise known as Big Toe. (Toe stands for TOE, which stands for Theory of Everything. There is no “Little Toe”, that’s just some scientist’s idea of a gag. Is that clear or should I explain it all again with diagrams?)
This no-teleporting law is, to me, immensely frustrating. Spock and Kirk and McCoy used to teleport all the time, though for some reason it only worked over short distances from ship to planet. Jeannie the Meanie does it every week in her teatime show I’m a Space Traveller with “tude. Black Hole Holidays is a show entirely based around the assumption that instant teleportation between planets is possible, and for years I thought the space travellers were real people. (They’re not! They’re actors! It’s all a fake! Stay with me, guys, I’m full of these kinds of insights.) But in the real world, tragically, teleportation just can’t happen.
Except, I discovered, the logic of the Quantum Beacon’s quantum paralleling system does allow, in theory, one very limited form of teleportation. This involves patches of space becoming “paired”. First, you program the computer to identify two patches of space which have a roughly comparable pattern of matter distribution. Because of quantum fuzz, this can be a fairly approximate pairing; in quantum reality, a chair and a table would be pretty well indistinguishable. (In fact, the chair would be a table some of the time – baffling, huh?) Both of the paired-up patches of space need to be, obviously, in the region of a Quantum Beacon.
Then you take detailed quantum-state readings of both patches of space, using nanotechnology and very powerful computers. You with me still?
And then, using multi-dimensional infraction theory, the space itself is teleported. Not the matter inside it, not the energy, but the space itself.
This requires (whew!) a reversal of the usual Einsteinian/Leibnitzian principle that all reality can be described in terms of the relationship between things. But it’s not that space is a Thing in Itself, a like, you know, noumenon. It’s the curvature of space, the displacedness of space, that’s identified and teleported. Here’s the patronising
