“Done.”
There is a trickle of moisture in the inner corners of her eyes. I pretend not to notice.
Brandon
I love my watch. It’s the best gadget I’ve ever had.
When I was a boy, I had a mobile phone that was also my personal computer and my imaginary friend. I programmed the computer to speak to me, to conduct entire conversations. “Brandon,” my phone would say, “let’s mitch off school today!”
I would tell stories about far-off lands to my phone and in return, my phone would tell me facts about the Universe. People at school saw me talking into my phone – and they thought I had friends! Far from it. I was talking to my phone.
Well? What’s wrong with that?
I was brilliant at school, because I never forgot a fact. But during exams, I used to have spasms of rage because I wasn’t allowed to have my mobile phone with me. I understand that they had to guard against cheating – but this wasn’t just my phone/camera/computer/TV/IPod music player! This was my best friend!
My phone was called Xil. That’s pronounced, Kzil. And I imagined that Xil was only disguised as a phone and that Xil was, in reality, an alien, born on a planet at the far end of the Universe.
Xil (the alien) can of course travel through time and space. And he has been visiting the Earth system since it was a molten ball of rock orbiting a newborn sun. Xil (or so I then believed, but I still do believe it) has witnessed at first hand most of the great events of Earth history. When Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes conquered Europe, Xil was there, perched on the Khan’s shoulder. When Byzantium fell, Xil was there. When Hitler killed the Jews, Xil floated above the death camps and watched. He was powerless to alter human history, and condemned to witness the very worst of human nature. But he also saw the best. Xil has smeared his name in the wet paint of the Sistine Chapel ceiling; if you examine the Adam and God fresco with a fine microscope, you will see the word “Xil” in tiny tiny letters above the touching fingers.
Xil watched the first performance of Hamlet, floating in the wings as Will Shakespeare read the prompts to his largely drunken cast. Xil sat with Mozart as he died his lonely death. Xil is a being of such incredible magic, and yet he still has the joy and zest of a child.
Xil was my dearest friend for three years, until I was thirteen, and then my parents found out and impounded my mobile phone. For six months I was bereft, without computer, without phone, without my best friend. My parents put me through an intensive course of psychotherapy. Eventually, realising I was liable to be trapped for two hours a week with this pompous imbecile for the rest of my childhood, I managed to persuade the psychiatrist that Xil was just a harmless delusional fantasy. All went back to normal. I was introverted, withdrawn, bookish, but at least I didn’t talk to my phone any more.
Then, when I was fifteen, my father bought me this watch. It is as accurate as an atomic clock. And it also functions as an alarm, a stopwatch, a calculator, and can even be used as a DVD player if you unfold the perspex screen. But since I’ve had my brain chip and phone and retinal implants, I no longer use the watch for computing and movies. I can just blink, and see a movie projected on my retina; I can just tense my throat, and receive a mobile phone call from anywhere in the Universe with access to a Quantum Beacon.
The value of my watch is its other great feature: It keeps a record of the time and date on every inhabited planet in the Universe .
This isn’t as simple as it sounds. Hope, for instance, one of the oldest colonies, is populated by colonists who travelled for 100 subjective years, which is equivalent to 400 Earth-elapsed years, thanks to Einsteinian time- dilation effects. (Time, of course, passes slower, the faster you move.) In the Hope Calendar, on the basis of actual elapsed time, it is now AD 3320. In the Earth Calendar, it is AD 3380. (And, by the by, on Hope at the moment it is 22.22 hours, on Earth it is 07.20 hours, and on board ship it is 11.15. But that has nothing to do with my main point, which is to do with years, not hours, so ignore this digression.)
Most people don’t care about variations in time between planets (though I do!). This is because all colony planets use Earth Time, regardless of what time distortions have occurred during the voyage. The minute the Quantum Beacon is turned on, the colonists abandon their subjective calendar and revert to Earth Time, which therefore has the status of “Real Time”.
My magic watch, however, is programmed to tell me what time it is subjectively on every occupied planet. It is also programmed to give subjective ages. For me, it is the year 3090, and I am eighty-five years old. But to the Earth Observer, it is AD 3380 and I am 200 years old. This is my official age.
But it is not my real age! It’s just not. I’ve never had those 200 years.
I’ve also devised a remote-control access technique that allows me to download information about other people’s elapsed ages. I’ve done this for Lena, the Captain, all the other crew members of course, and I do it for everyone I ever encounter. So I know their real ages, and their Earth Time ages.
I can play endlessly with this watch of mine, for it tells me the truth about time. Everyone’s time. I know what year it really is on Cambria, on Illyria, on every occupied planet. And I know how many years have elapsed for every person I have ever met.
All this, and more, my watch can do. And I waste, I must admit, a huge amount of time playing around with these facts about subjective and Earth-elapsed time. I don’t know why. It serves no useful function, except that it underlines to me how readily human beings have swallowed the Earth’s intellectual dictatorship. We live by their time; we age ourselves by their years. But every planet has its own elapsed time. And any one who has ever travelled at near-light speed through space has his or her own elapsed time. It makes us unique. We are fellow travellers in the space-time continuum; but nevertheless, we each inhabit different times.
We are islands of time in a shifting-sands Universe.
How philosophical is that!
I miss Xil. He was my only real friend.
I know Xil’s time too. I programmed it into my watch a long time ago. And I factored in the fact that he makes frequent faster-than-light-speed journeys to every part of the Universe. I know Xil’s age down to the nearest hour. I will never see him or speak to him again, but I know his age. He is my imaginary friend. I have him in my watch.
People, by the way, tell me I’m weird.
I guess I am.
Lena
We are in orbit around a barren rock close to the system sun Kappa o332 b. It’s Fireworks Night.
We roll back the canopy of the bridge and sit in our suits surrounded by stars. A pair of Outlaw Traders have commandeered two Corporation warships, and we watch in awe as they slowly glide past us towards the yellow Cepheid star. This star is a pulsating variable, and the planet beneath us bears the scorch marks from the last time the star expanded to its fullest girth and blazed down on the arid rocks. Now the Cepheid is in its waning cycle, slowly diminishing by about 10 per cent of its previous diameter. This winking star hasn’t spawned any organic life forms on its orbiting planets. Nor are there any other kinds of complex self-organising entities in this system. But the fourth planet from the star has a rich atmosphere of ammonia and liquid hydrogen and a stable orbit. And it is blessed, too, with lakes of frozen oxygen. It is a perfect candidate for terraforming, and it is the commencement of this process that we are about to watch.
I remember, fondly, the terraforming of Hope. We created legions of oxygenating robots to stamp across the surface of the planet, swallowing carbon monoxide and spewing out rich clean air. We turned a frozen Hell into a tropical Paradise. It took sixty years, in all, before settlers could walk the surface with an oxygen mask and a pressure suit.
The technology is, these days, much smarter. A micro-thin heat-absorbing lattice has been draped over the surface of the planet. Nanobots have burrowed into the oxygen lakes. Every tiny element is network-connected so that each part functions as a thinking cog in a machine of stunning complexity. And each is connected as part of an energy grid, powered by an energy transmitter in orbit above the planet. This transmitter, in turn, will be powered by energy milked from the sun itself.
