space. One of them was buried in the body of the Commander of the Illyrian Beacon. I had inserted it there nearly fifteen years previously, after meeting her at a social gathering, and firing a concealed compressed airgun pellet into her spleen.
There were at least a hundred other people infected with my robot microbes scattered around the Universe. For years I have been planting poisoned nano-bombs into the bodies of the Cheo’s administrators. And all of them died when I sent my mental signal out: ATTACK. The pseudo-Bugs then replicated at astonishing speed, eating and destroying everything around them – metal, plastic, and flesh. I have no idea how many other humans were killed by the micro-monsters, until I send my counter-signal: SELF-DESTRUCT, PLEASE.
And then, just as I had planned, Earth’s computers ordered the destruction of all the Beacons. Earth itself was safe – I have never been there, and I have never managed to plant any robot microbes there. But in their paranoia, the Earth Humans have burned every bridge and road connecting them to the rest of the inhabited Universe. They are entirely isolated.
But my fear now is: can I control my Doppelganger Bugs? And can I destroy them? I had programmed them to self-destruct at a mental command (SELF-DESTRUCT, PLEASE) from me. But what if they have evolved to a state of mutiny, and cannot be told to commit suicide? With their self-replicating capacity, and their total immunity to any form of weapon or any other physical threat, my robo-Bugs could swamp and devour all humanity. And, of course, because the Beacons are down, I would never know…
I explain it all to Lena. Then I open a briefcase. I take out a small cylinder and carefully open it. Inside is a single invisible microscopic robo-Bug. I transmit a mental signal: AWAKE.
Within seconds a black swarming mass has appeared on the table. A few seconds later, the black mass fills the air. I try to focus, and give the mental signal to self-destruct.
I cannot focus. My thoughts are a whirl. Lena’s face fills with horror as Doppelganger Bugs start to swarm around her. They rest on her skin, her hair, her nostrils. And still, I try and I try to focus, and I mentally utter the words that will cause them to be obliterated: SELF-DESTRUCT, PLEASE.
I feel nothing happening. Nothing… happening… My heart starts to spasm.
“Fucking do something!” she screams at me.
I cannot speak.
The Bugs have covered her entire body now, she is a black mummy with suppurating flesh. They are crowding into her mouth, they are overflowing from her ears. She tries to scream but the Bugs are blocking her throat. I panic, and try to pluck the Bugs from her mouth. But they merely swarm and enter my nostrils, and cover my body too. I feel Bugs forcing open my eyelids, gathering on my eyeballs. I try to brush them off me but they are legion, my body itches. My mind is in a state of total panic but I try again and again to focus…
… and focus…
… and focus…
Then the itching stops.
The Bugs aren’t moving. They are dead. I frantically wipe my eyes, my hands, sweeping myself clean. Clouds of dead Bugs fall to the ground. Lena chokes and vomits out vile black-specked vomit on to the floor. She is shuddering with fear, pounding her body with her hands to shake the Bugs free. I know that all her memories of being flayed are swamping her, and her skin still itches with the memory of the crawling evil microbes.
I shout at the room computer to switch on a blast of cold water. Lena and I stand beneath the cold water, feeling the dead Bugs being swooshed off our bodies. I pick dead Bugs out of her hair. They crumble in my hands.
“It’s worked.”
Her smile is wavery, and fearful, yet infinitely relieved.
Brandon
Flanagan has explained everything. We salute his genius, and his guile, and his relentless courage over many years. But we curse him, too, for not telling us what he’d done just a little sooner. While he was off fucking that fucking bitch, we were all steeped in total despair, expecting the imminent end of humanity.
Bastard. He likes his little joke.
We’ve boarded the Kornbluth Beacon, and found the eerie residue of the crew, eaten and reduced to slime. The crackling sound underfoot is the only residue we find of the dead robo-Bugs. We fumigate the ships, and send the slime and the crackle out into the emptiness of space. We surmise that the same thing has happened all across the Universe: the Bugs have self-destructed following Flanagan’s signal.
Flanagan is utterly confident that his plan has worked. The Beacons are gone, the robo-Bugs are gone, and humanity is saved.
And so we savour our triumph, the salvation of the entire human race. Except… except…
Except, in fact, victory feels like shit. My many appalling and traumatising defeats have been so much more enjoyable.
And I also Why does it feel so bad!! Why…
We had a huge party. It was magnificent but…
Fuck!
I feel so alone.
This is great. It’s everything I ever dreamed of. But…
It’s like a great big knife coming from the skies and cutting the connection between your right cerebral hemisphere and your left cerebral hemisphere. That’s how it feels. To me. How does it feel? To you?
Flanagan tries to butter me up at the celebration party. “I should have told you, Brandon,” he says, “what my plans were. I trust you so much…”
I don’t fucking care. Yeah yeah yeah, future of humanity, yeah yeah yeah. So fucking what?
Because the real tragedy of what has happened is this:
The Universal Web is no more.
The instantaneous network of communication between the three thousand or so inhabited planets is gone. The effortless and immediate access to the music charts, the books charts, the reviews, the gossip columns, it’s all gone. No more Earth TV. No more of the shows that I have loved so much – Penny for Your Thoughts, Enemies in Love, The Last Holocaust, Life in Hell, Death Island, Beelzebub and Trish and a hundred others. Sol system drama and comedy is without a shadow of doubt the best in inhabited space. And, despite all the horrors and the persecutions and the genocide and the rapes and the deaths of small infants caused by Sol system’s corrupt regime… I will miss those shows. How could I not? I will now have to wait a hundred and fifty years for the next episode of any one of those TV programmes. And so I will never again be current. I am backwatered.
Which doesn’t matter of course. The most important thing is that we have liberated humanity.
The hell it doesn’t matter!
What will Diane say, when she learns that Roger has had a sex change during his time in therapy for paedophiliac offences, in Roger and Diane? I have to know. I cannot wait a hundred and fifty years to find out. How will those two gay restaurateurs in Amyville cope when they have to share a raft across a whirlpool with a former Las Vegas World Champion Wrestler? I have to see it! I ache with anticipation of experiencing the embarrassment and absurdity of it all .
My brain is going to shrivel too. What are the latest developments in multi-dimensional superstring theory? Is it really the case that each one of us carries a million universes with us in every particle of skin? Is that an exaggeration? A solecism? A mathematical cul de sac? I absolutely damn well have to know!
But I cannot know. Not for a century and a half, at the very least. At one stroke, humanity has been parochialised. I can no longer send emails or vidmessages to friends who live hundreds of light-years away from me. I have no further access to the seething hubbub of ideas that makes the Universal Web the greatest scientific forum known to man.
I am an island. We are all islands. Much has been gained – but something has been lost.
I mourn the something. It matters to me. I regret none of what we have done – but I know that I regret the consequence.
