metaphor: Imagine a bed with a hollow in it, where a person has been sleeping. Now imagine that hollow can be swapped for the hollow in another, different bed. No one will ever notice the difference; but the hollows will have interchanged. Space will have teleported.
That’s my theory. No one has ever thought of doing it before because, I suppose, it is a totally stupid and futile thing to do. What’s the point of teleporting space! But there is a point. (Finally! Eventually!) The point is:
It doesn’t really work. Space does get teleported, but the process is messy and ugly and it does weird things to dimensional reality.
Things such as this. We look at our plasma screen and see the Corporation warships turn and prepare to pursue. We are a nippy little minnow skeetering off into the ocean. They are the barracudas and the sharks. They will outrun us easily.
But then a green light flashes on my screen. The Teleport function has engaged. It covers a region of space large enough to encircle the warships – but not large enough to encircle us! You see! All this has been carefully and brilliantly planned! The space is then teleported and swapped for a portion of space near a Quantum Beacon in area Q432 of the Milky Way.
And at the precise moment in which spatial teleportation occurs, space itself is rent in a multiplicity of twains.
Just for an instant.
In fact, less than an instant, a tiny portion of an instant, one times ten to the power of millions. But for that brief period, space does what space shouldn’t do. It isn’t there.
The consequences of the rift in space are cataclysmic. To us, from our vantage point speeding niftily away, it’s as if a giant god with an invisible hand has squeezed the Universe. The Corporation warships are crushed instantaneously, and a huge tidal wave of pressure rushes through space. Our ship is tossed and hurled around, suns flare, planets are caught in vast whirlpools hurling round at light speed and further distorting dimensional reality as relativistic effects kick in.
We are swatted away from this vast dimensional hurricane like a fly, and we hurtle through space. Our engines explode. Our hull melts and reforms. Then the Beacon ship itself falls to pieces around us.
We are left floating free in space, secure in our spacesuits. Alby throws his lattice net around us again, and tows us through deep space. I am weeping tears of amazement.
What a fucking mess I just caused! What a total gross-out fucking up of reality!
I ripped a piece of space. No man or child has ever done so much.
I’m the king of the castle!
Alby
We float through spaccccee for nearly two years. I find it relaxing. I accept that the ressst of them are sssuffering badly. But they do have food and fluid in their suits, enough to keep them alive for five yearsssss in all.
At lassst, we are picked up by a merchant ship. I flicker away on the outssside of the ship, doing my imperssssonation of a waning comet. The others recccceive their creature comfortsss and a lift to the nearessst habitable planet.
Another ten yearsss passss.
Lena
I’m conscious there is something of an atmosphere. I am not as popular as I would like.
This I find peculiar. After all, since I am technically still their hostage, I could have betrayed them all to the Captain of the merchant vessel which picked us up. I could have denounced them as pirates. But then, I suppose, if I had done that, they would simply have killed the Captain and stolen the ship.
Instead – they took the Captain prisoner, and stole his ship. After great debate, it was decided to put the Captain into cryo-sleep. This was a one-man merchant vessel, mainly run by autopilot. The Captain had taken his cargo through 200 light-years of space, most of it spent in coma. Strictly speaking the ship could run without him; but he was the human failsafe. He was, like all such merchant Captains, a sour, embittered, supremely well read intellectual. In other periods, he would have been a professor in a university. These days, such people are sent on long lonely space journeys with computer access to every academic book and journal ever published. When he reaches his destination, this Captain will publish an academic treatise based on nearly forty years of intensive study. Occasionally, during that period, he would have had to veer around an asteroid swarm. But generally, it’s an easy life.
This particular Captain is, as it happens, clinically insane. I read his treatise and it was utter gibberish. But still, the ship sailed on. Rather than bicker about who should have the one cryo-berth, we stuck the mad fucker in it and aged ten years.
I decided to use this period to be sociable, and to make myself the undisputed social and emotional heart of the group. I was motherly yet sexual to little Jamie. I spoke to Harry about the bleak loneliness of my life, and my awe at the beauty of the universe. I asked Alliea gently about love, and encouraged her to tell me stories of her exploits with her lover Rob during his long and ill-advised boxing career.
I wrangled with Brandon about the design of spaceships, and impressed him with my first-hand knowledge of the great ship designers – Bartleby, Smith, Malone and Davis. And I exuded all my available pheromones with Kalen, sensing her peculiar half-cat sexual energy that drew her to me as a fellow predator and sexually rapacious female. We did not physically consummate our love; but each day, I perfumed her erotically. I know, by now, how to control my own scent emissions; I can drive any man or woman insane with desire with the rank smell of my own heat. But with Kalen I am more subtle; I toy with her, I seduce her, I enthral her.
And yet, the fact of the matter is, they all hate me. Kalen in particular treats me with an angry scorn. Why? Because of my one error during the battle of Cambria? The fact that instead of joining my companions in battle, I went off and, as it were, using the common but inelegant idiom, fucked myself?
We won, didn’t we! What’s the problem with these people!
And as for Jamie – what a selfish spoiled child! I’ve spent hours bonding with him, listening to his favourite nu-heavymetalthrashpunk music bands, talking about quantum theory, showing him my favourite cartoons. And he calls me “oppressive” and “mommyish”. “Mommyish!” Me! I’m the most toxic femme fatale in outer space!
Alliea, of course, is an emotional cripple. I’ve tried explaining to her how she was locked in a symbiotic- dependency relationship with Rob, unable to have an opinion unless he shared it, unable to enjoy an experience unless he was enjoying it too. I outlined for her the basic principles of Inner Self Management as expounded in the New Guru books of the twenty-second century. I tried to teach her forgetting-remembering mantras, which allow us to control and corral potent memories so that they are no longer present in the subconscious mind, but can be easily recalled with a simple verbal trigger. For Alliea’s mind is a blur and jumble of memories of happy and tragic times with this, frankly, brute of a man. She needs to lock them away, and keep the key safe; that way she can get on and advance herself emotionally.
She listens to me patiently; they all listen to me patiently. But there is that strained look in her eyes. It’s the look I myself assume when someone I can’t risk offending is telling me in detail the plot of a long and boring film. Honestly, what’s wrong with these people! Don’t they realise how much they can learn from me?
Brandon’s okay, I guess. He’s so laidback. If I were a widget, he might marry me. As things stand, I am just a useful wall to bounce his facts against. I persevere wildly with Brandon, but he bores me rigid. I once slept for two and a half minutes during one of his sentences, though of course, I masked it well and he never knew.
Harry just smiles at me and says nothing. He has his own pheromones; and I sense, very vividly, that he is aroused at the thought of eating me alive. He knows that I know this; he enjoys watching me squirm as he slavers. I wake up some days with pains in my leg and stomach, which feel scarily like bite marks. They are psychosomatic; the bastard is mentally eating me alive.
