“Aaah!” says Lena, and explodes beneath me.
Flanagan
“Now explain,” Lena says, after our passionate burst of sexual energy that has left me shuddering and glowing in equal measure.
So I do.
It began with a game of chess. I met a Grand Master in a bar on the planet Slayer in the binary star system called Hell Dimension. He taught me how to play the game, how to hold interlocking strategies in my head. And how to sacrifice pawns, in order to check the king.
Then I studied military philosophy and absorbed one key principle: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
And then…
His name was Martin. He was a collector of antique toys. He carried in his luggage a virtual model of the solar system complete with orbiting spaceships, which he used to show to anyone who would stay to watch. He was also a world authority on words beginning with “w”, a unique speciality. He loved prime numbers, and could count in them up to well beyond the million mark. He was a sad, lonely, emotionally dysfunctional man.
And he was also a nano-scientist. One of the greatest and most gifted men in his field. Though he was, tragically, unemployable, because people found him so damned annoying.
I met him on a holiday. We struck up a conversation on the tour bus. I was in a chatty mood. He started talking about toy spaceships, which initially I found rather interesting. He told me how he once built a replica Sputnik, and sent it into orbit with a bioengineered monkey the size of a wristwatch. Then he told me about all the other toy spaceships he had built in his miniature laboratory. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, each of which he had named. And as his accounts continued, interminably, I realised I had settled into a state of ennui and despair which prevented me from ending the conversation, or even ignoring it. Occasionally I tried to interrupt, but to little avail. I made a vow: never again talk to strangers.
I soon shook him off, and enjoyed my holiday, a three-month stop on a subtropical planet called Bask. I went scuba-diving. Hang-gliding. I was alone, between partners, I was drinking too much. I used to spend a lot of time at the bar. After my second bottle or so, Martin used to sidle up to me and talk as if we were friends. The first few times, I told him to fuck off, but that made no difference. Whatever I said, he waited there patiently, with a hangdog look. “Kick me”, “Abuse me”, his expression said. “Prove what a man you are.” My heart wasn’t really in it.
So every night, we sat and he talked to me, and I thought about other things. I was in a strange state at this time. I was haunted by morbid memories of my dead family. I had a crippling case of musician’s block – I couldn’t play, or sing, sometimes I even forgot entire melodies. I was more than a little psychotic, to be honest. Part of me enjoyed his company, which shows how far gone I was.
One night I went to a different bar in a different hotel, and got drunk there. After several hours, Martin sidled up to me. I blurrily deduced he had been to every hotel bar in town looking for me. I made my excuses and tried to leave but he followed me. We ended up in another bar. I really was very drunk indeed at that point. Or maybe just mad. I forget. Strange times.
I wasn’t sure if Martin actually liked me. Or if he was in love with me. Or if he hated me. But he saw in me a kindred spirit. He saw the faraway look in my eyes, he recognised the spacer tattoos. He found me exotic.
One day he started telling me about his work, with infinitesimally tiny nanoware. He was, he avowed, a world authority on this, too (as well, of course, as the letter “w”). But he couldn’t get work in his field of expertise. He didn’t know why not. It made no sense! He was a world authority after all! Some people are… etc. etc. You get the idea. It went on and on like that. On and on. But after a while, something clicked in my head.
That’s when I had the idea.
And the idea grew and grew in my mind, until it possessed my very being. I made my resolve. A binding vow. This was to be it. My life’s work. My only purpose.
And so Martin became my friend. I extended my holiday. I plied him with drinks. I became his best pal. And when his own holiday came to an end, I offered to pay for him to stay. So that the two of us, we two buddies, could spend some time together. He had nowhere else to go, so of course he said yes. And we stayed, trapped in that exotic dungeon.
When he started getting restless, I provided him with beautiful women to keep him company in his room. He rarely had sex, he just talked to them. It seared inches off their souls, but they were plucky girls and they did all I asked of them.
And so, for six months, then another six months, then for another whole year, I spent every evening sitting and talking with Martin and listening to his appalling stories and his ghastly views on life. He despised other species, other races, women, gays, tall men, muscular men, any man with a larger penis than his, which was most men, stupid people, clever people, and people who read books.
He hated his mother who, he claimed, was a sour and begrudging bitch because of bungled fertility treatments that had led to her having eleven psychologically mutated and retarded children – before, that is, he came along. And he hated his father who was weak and immature and who used to say things like “Life is for living!”, and “Let’s have some fun!” instead of wallowing in despair, as any sensible sentient being should do.
He berated his eleven feeble-minded brothers and sisters, and argued vociferously that they should have been drowned at birth. He was cruel to the prostitutes I bought for him. He belittled them and sapped their confidence, but he could rarely sustain an erection for more than a few seconds (as the girls graphically used to explain to me). And, most of all, he hated his five wives, who he had married specifically and exclusively with the intention of wrecking them as human beings. And in this, he had succeeded magnificently: three wives committed suicide, one (the fourth wife, Jenny) died of anorexia, and one (the fifth wife) died in a car crash after taking a massive overdose of antidepressants washed down with whisky.
For two appalling years I spent every single day and every single night with this monster of a man, boosting his ego and agreeing with his dumb opinions. It was, I can honestly say, a living hell. But it was worth it. Because, in return for my company, and as payback for the fabulous wealth I lavished upon him, he built me a self-replicating robot microbe.
The microbe’s nanochip brain was, at my specific instructions, attuned to my cerebral cortex wave patterns. I could control its movements by my thoughts; I could make it move and act and react. I could also instruct it to reproduce. Drawing its energies from curled dimensional space, and sucking up micro-particles from seemingly empty air, it could generate a hundred versions of itself, then a thousand, then a million.
I told no one of my plan, or my intentions. But – after finally shaking off Martin, changing planets eleven times and changing my identity twice – I trained by myself on a deserted barren planet for six months, until I could control the microbes’ tiniest movement with my thoughts. I could make the microbes swarm and form shapes. And I could program them to eat through metal and plastic, and even flesh.
I had built my own Doppelganger Bug – a robot replica of the real organic Bug. If I’d had real Bugs, maybe I’d have used them; luckily, that wasn’t an option. Because, of course, all the Bugs in the Universe are still trapped in one crowded sector of space. The containing shells of Debatable Space actually do work.
But now, thanks to Martin, I had the perfect secret weapon. The pseudo-Bug.
However, I did have one major problem. I possessed a weapon so terrifying I was afraid to use it. What if my robot Bugs got out of control? What if they became as big a danger as the real thing? So I decided to keep them as a last resort. We would endeavour, first of all, to win the hard way.
So I embarked upon Plan A: an attempt to destroy the Corporation’s dictatorial rule through force of arms and raw courage. It was a magnificent venture, and I honestly thought it might succeed. If there were two entire planets in inhabited space free of the Cheo’s tyranny, then a resistance army might slowly build. And in a hundred years, others would follow me to continue my work. I did not, of course, expect to live myself. I merely wanted to inspire, to chip away at a single portion of the Cheo’s empire, so that future generations might have a chance to do what I could not.
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
