Debatable Space

Book 2

Excerpts from the thought diary of Lena Smith, 2004

I have had three best friends in the course of my whole life.

I wish it had been more.

My first best friend was Carla. When I was seven years old we played together every day. We made up worlds and stories. I was Ebony, an African princess. She was Melissa, the Queen of our Queendom, the fabulous country of Alchemy.

Carla had beautiful blonde hair, a button nose, and a great stare. But I had all the ideas. I made up the stories, I made up the maps. I created costumes for us both. I painted my bedroom in black and gold to make it a suitable Queen’s Throne Room for Queen Melissa. And whatever I said or did, whatever brave or original idea I came up with, Carla always nodded, very seriously, and stared her formidable stare. So I would know that every idea I had was actually her idea, every thought was her thought. I was her willing slave.

When we were ten, we decided to hold a joint birthday party together, even though my birthday was in February and hers was in October. We wrote all the invitations, we used our pocket money to buy balloons, we made each other presents out of papier mache and brightly coloured paper. We made fairy cakes with our mums and stole as many as we could. Then, on the day of our party, we both locked ourselves in my room and played with our imaginary guests and handed out imaginary party bags. We gorged ourselves on cake, and that night I was sick in bed. When Carla’s parents came to take her home, she had a wicked little smile on her face. They knew she’d been up to something, but they never knew that she’d just had her “official” birthday.

We rarely quarrelled, and she only once really really lost her temper with me. It happened when I scored more baskets than her in basketball at playtime. I made two mistakes. First, I scored more baskets. And then I laughed, triumphantly. So Carla went very very quiet and didn’t speak to me for the whole rest of the week. We still met, and played together, but instead of speaking she would give messages to her blonde Bratz and ask the poor doll to pass them on. By the Friday of that week, I was devastated and I gave her all my pocket money to buy back her friendship.

Carla never bullied me though. She never bossed me either. She just always got her way. It was easier, we both always knew what to do – namely, what she wanted. For otherwise, I feared, in my state of youthful existential panic, I might have had to make my own mind up about things…

Then Carla’s parents decided to move abroad. Her dad had a job in Germany working on bridges or something. Her mum was part-German anyway. When Carla told me this news, I burst into tears. I begged her to stay, to join our family instead. Carla just stared at me, calmly, with that piecing stare. And she didn’t smile. Not once. Eventually, she calmly said, “Don’t make a fuss, Lena.” And I cried even more, for ages.

I explained it all to my mother, how I wouldn’t be able to cope without Carla and how life was no longer worth living. But my mum just said, “Never mind, you’ll soon make new friends,” and I cried my eyes out again.

I cried again on the day that Carla left. I was eleven by then. My mother was genuinely frightened at my behaviour. I was not just upset, I was hysterical.

I met Carla years later at a friend’s dinner party, when we were both in our early thirties. She didn’t actually remember me. She was still very nice, but by that time the stare had worn off and she was a frazzled but cheerful mother of four. And she didn’t remember Princess Ebony, or the Queendom of Alchemy, or me.

Some best friend.

My second best friend was also a woman. She was called Helen Clarke, and we both studied History at university in Edinburgh. Neither of us was Scottish, neither of us was quite sure why we’d chosen a university so far away from our families and friends back home. But it was a magical time. The city was dominated by a castle on a massive rock, looming and glowering over the Georgian and Victorian buildings of the city. We studied the history of the town, we read all the books which were set there like Jekyll and Hyde and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and the novels of Ian Rankin. And whenever I read a book, Helen read it next; our fingerprints jointly stained score upon score of battered paperback novels.

I loved History. I read voraciously. I rarely forgot a fact. But Helen was the scholar. She came covered in clouds of glory – we all knew she had been offered a place at Oxford and had turned it down. Her mother was a Professor of History at Cambridge University, her father was a senior civil servant. I stayed with them once. All the curtains were chintz, there were knick-knacks in every room, not a trace of dust, and everyone spoke ironically and at length. I adored them. I compared them with my own suburban parents, with their boisterous enthusiasms and their silly holiday games. And I yearned for my own family to die painlessly and heroically in a freak asteroid strike. Then I could adopt Helen’s parents as my own de facto family.

At Finals, Helen got a decent 2.1. I received a glittering First, and was marked down by my tutors for great things to come. Strangely, after that, I saw very little of Helen. She moved back home without saying goodbye, and never turned up for any of our college reunions. Ten years later I was still sending her long, detailed letters (yes, I wrote letters, not emails in those days!) every Christmas, describing lyrically and entertainingly my intellectual trials and tribulations, my boyfriend troubles, my thoughts on life and everything. Helen never wrote back, we never met. We spoke on the phone a few times, but somehow an actual meeting always proved problematic.

Eventually I got the message. I stopped writing the letters, making the phone calls. Now, I can hardly remember Helen’s face. But I remember that sense of specialness. We were the terrible two. Yin and Yang, left and right, a bonded pair.

And then – we weren’t. It was over, and we were strangers.

I still get distressed over it, to be honest. Why wasn’t Helen more needy? How could she cut me out of her life so easily?

Of course, I moved on. I made new friends. Except they weren’t really friends. Not real friends. That intensity was missing.

It’s not that I was a social cripple. I was a reasonably good raconteuse. I could banter, amusingly. I was amiable, easygoing, sweetlooking. People took to me, by and large.

But I always found it hard to make best friends. Something in me resists it. Perhaps it’s because I felt let down – first by Clara, then by Helen. Or perhaps I am too independent, I find it too hard to love.

My third best friend was Tom, who was also my lover. Tom was different. He was special. He was the only friend who never, ever let me down.

Although, I suppose, when I think about it – I’m the one who let him down.

Freckles were my curse.

As a child, the freckles made me cute. People always praised them. “Look at those lovely freckles.” “Isn’t she cute?” I took it as praise. And maybe it was meant as such. But in retrospect… I cringe. “ Cute? ”

Freckles were my curse!

Does that sound extreme? Maybe. And, okay, as a teenager, admittedly, the freckles were a neutral thing. I was more embarrassed by my thick square glasses, in an age where contacts for teenagers were the norm. My eyes were particularly poor, combining astigmatism with myopia, and I was considered a bad candidate for lenses. So I had glasses, and freckles, and pale skin that never tanned but only ever burned.

One summer when I was fourteen I played on the beach with my family and that night the skin peeled off my forehead and legs and face. My mother warned me to be more careful in the sun. So I wept, and the tears burned my raw peeling cheeks.

When I was sixteen, I was so badly sunburned I had to spend two days in bed. My mother said, casually, “Well, I did warn you.”

I read an article in a magazine. And I learned: people with freckles don’t tan properly. So that was why. The freckles were to blame.

It’s not as if I was careless or stupid in my dealings with the sun. I didn’t seek out blazing sunshine with all its ensuing pain. I just found it hard to always wear a hat, sit in the shade, avoid hot days, never wear skirts in summer. I longed to be a vampire, because at least then my sun affliction would be a symptom of my dangerous and evil nature. Instead, I was merely pale. And, did I mention this? Freckled. Who ever heard of a vampire with freckles?

A fact: a freckled person can never, ever, be cool.

What’s worse, the freckles grew and multiplied in sunlight. Some summers, I was covered in blotches, like some alien in a Star Trek episode. And so as I hit twenty, the pale spectacled mutant-freckle look was becoming the bane of my life. It defined me, it limited me. And it controlled how others perceived me: I was never smart, tough-cookie, wisecracking brain-like-a-razorblade Lena. I was just poor old freckly Lena.

I came to hate suntans. I hated the vulgar display of long-legged beauties with their bronzed skins, and men with six-pack torsos who wear no T-shirts in the blazing sun.

Florence was my favourite city, I used to go there every year when I was in my twenties. But it was spoiled for me by all the bare skin on shameless display. The city was swarming with gorgeous, smiling, happy, slim, sexy, tanned young people, in their revealing shorts and skimpy T-shirts. They were everywhere, and I loathed them.

The purest joy I knew was when I went to see the Donatellos and the Giambolognas in the Bargello and Michelangelo’s David in the Accademia. I adored the look and texture and sensual joy of those naked muscular bodies which were, arguably through historical accident, but that’s not an argument which concerns me here, entirely untanned.

And even now, many years later, I am offended at the basic unfairness of this whole skin thing. It affronts me that some people can absorb sun like oxygen. They never sear or scald, they are at ease with their own bodies. Whereas I… I… I…

Move on, Lena.

And yet, I’ve always been fit. Wiry, lean – fit. At university I was a famously keen runner. During my twenties I would run ten or twenty miles a week. But for reasons I can never comprehend, I never managed to be happy in the body I wore. The moment I entered a room, my posture and poise projected the unmistakable message: It’s Only Me.

And, most monstrous of all, added to the unfairness of having freckles and pale skin in an Ambre Solaire-worshipping culture, it was also unjust that after years of keeping fit and watching my diet, of not gorging on rich foods, not drinking rich red wines, not splurging on melty fat-rich suppurating cheeses, and not oozing cream eclairs down my delirious throat, and not having pig-out midnight feasts of icecream from the carton, of shunning cooked breakfasts with greasy sausages and crispy fried bread and never eating rich meat sauces with wine or madeira or port or brandy, after all those many years of moderation and restraint and holding back, it was simply not fucking fair that at the age of forty-four I should suffer a massive and fatal heart attack.

That, and freckles. Those are the two things about my life that I most resent.

I am God.

And so are You.

After my first degree at Edinburgh, I chose to move to Oxford to pursue my DPhil. My subject was the history of science, focusing on the remarkable rivalry between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The work I did in those years proved to be the foundation of my future work on systems and psychology. I found it absorbing and exhilarating. At first, I was under the spell of Newton; that powerful personality, that radiant intelligence. Scientist, alchemist, thieftaker (now that’s a story for another day…), cheat, and bully. I loved him.

And yet later, of course, it was Newton’s nemesis Leibnitz who became the object of my fascination. Leibnitz, a German genius, a philosopher, a mathematician, and, in the view of many of the finest minds in science, the original inventor and describer of the principle of relativity. In his arcane and complex philosophy of monads, Leibnitz set out the basic principles of a relativistic universe long long before Einstein.

However, after three heady years of reading primary sources and attempting to fathom the intricacies of calculus and mathematical modelling, my priorities shifted. I had to get a job. The job I took wasn’t much different to my research work – I became a research fellow in the college where I had previously been a DPhil student. But the horizons of my world shifted. I was introduced to bureaucracy, university politics, and the entire microcosm of tedious make-work.

I had an office. I had a university email address. I bitched about the photocopier. I bitched about how many emails I had to read. I sent emails bitching about how many emails I was receiving, and received back emails bitching about… you get the idea. I attended course committee meetings, and I spent hours of my life assembling and stapling paperwork in order to be prepared for meetings in which nothing of any substance was actually said.

I gave my heart and soul to the students and had my trust betrayed. I was mocked and belittled by fellow tutors. I was stuck in lifts with men smelling of tweed and middle-aged women who spent their early mornings crazed in the company of cheap perfume. I found myself, in my late twenties and early thirties, a dowdy spinster surrounded by bare-armed tattooed young female students with lurid hair colours and pierced tongues. And I found myself unable to sexually desire the gorgeous male students who surrounded me because I felt they were old enough to be my sons – even though they weren’t old enough, and I had no son.

It sucked away my soul. I think my skin became paler, and frecklier. And I proved to be, despite my academic smarts, a profound nincompoop with regard to the ways of the world, always getting it wrong.

And so I became a college mouse. I held my own academically – I published papers on Newton’s theory of Optics, I wrote reviews for specialist journals. But I had the reputation of being a dry stick, humourless and unimaginative.

My students didn’t like me much. They thought I was a relic from another age. I had the reputation of being a frigid spinster. In fact, I did have sex, a few times, with some of my less repellent colleagues. But I treated it as a chore, an act designed to thwart the stereotype about me which my every word and action served to confirm.

I felt like a character in a science fiction story, trapped in someone else’s body, articulating someone else’s words. To be frank, I bored even myself. And by the time I was thirty-six, my course was set, my die stamped, I knew I would never change.

Then I published my life’s work, and everything changed.

It’s what I’d hoped for, of course. In my dreams, my masterly academic book was going to transform my reputation and my status. In pursuit of this dream I worked long long hours, I read books on science and crime and history, I read novels, I absorbed so much knowledge that I felt my own self was being swamped in information.

Most crucially, I became the supreme intellectual magpie – stealing ideas from here, there, and everywhere. And I was smart enough also to realise that the most important area of modern scientific and philosophical thought was not computing or string theory or postmodernism or chaos theory, but the new science of emergence.

Emergence, put simply, is the study of how systems of simple organisms tend to organise themselves into more complex structures. They do! They just do! Marcus Miller was the great white hope of emergence theory in the late 2030s; he transformed the ideas of twentieth century researchers like John Holland and Art Samuel and arrived at a computer model that flawlessly replicated the workings of emergent systems such as ant colonies.

The miracle of it all is this: put a couple of random atoms together and they will spontaneously turn themselves into something more complicated, a system governed by some set of rules that allows random particles to function as more than the sum of their parts. And a process of evolution – mutation, trial and error, survival of the “most fitted” – will then cause greater and greater levels of complexity to occur. Emergence is, essentially, the study of self-organisation; it is how, in specific terms, order emerges from chaos.

So in other words, no God is needed. Night turns to day spontaneously.

I found this heady, exhilarating stuff. For me, the joy of these ideas colliding together was greater than any amount of partying or alcoholic stimulation or even orgasm. I was high on ideas. I lusted on abstractions…

And, as I read further, I became fascinated by the fact that the principle of emergence applies regardless of the size and scale of the units. Atoms evolve through emergence; and so do animals. Mechanical systems spontaneously self-organise; so do living beings. Bees divide into workers and drones. Fireflies flash in synchrony. An accumulation of cosmic rubble becomes a sun, and then a solar system. And ants are of course the supreme example of a living emergent system. Each individual ant is non-sentient, a low IQ insect of limited abilities. But in colonies ants combine in complex systems and act almost as a single and highly intelligent being.

And as it is with atoms, and as it is with ants, so it is with the entire Universe. Traditional science always regarded the laws of nature themselves as sacrosanct, “given”. But emergence theory suggests that the Universe itself evolved. And not only the Universe, but the laws that govern the Universe. The laws of nature themselves are not a given, a gift from some capricious and, frankly, half-baked Deity. Instead, the laws of nature are self-organising; they adapt and change, or fail to adapt and die out. And as a result, we live in a Universe governed by natural “laws” which had to fight every step of the way to come into existence.

Even though I’m not a scientist by training, I was quick to realise the huge value of all of these developments. Emergence, it seemed to me, is the theory which unifies all theories. It explains how life evolved; how intelligence evolved; it unifies quantum theory with cosmological theory with biological theory with computer theory.

But at the time I was writing, the study of emergence and self-organisation had been hijacked by the computer geeks. The underlying philosophical principles so beautifully anatomised by early theorists such as Lee Smolin had been lost. The geeks kept asking “How?”; they didn’t know how to ask “Why?”

My original and pioneering approach was to apply the principles of emergence theory and relativity theory to human consciousness. I…

(Feel free to skip ahead, by the way, if this section is boring you. I know it’s complicated and hard. So if you have one of those sad grasshopper minds which can’t sustain abstract thought for more than a few seconds, or if you’re a child of MTV with a channel-hopping finger and no stamina, then please, just skip! Move on to the exciting sections later in which I battle with master criminals and put my life in danger on a daily basis. Go on – I won’t be offended – see if I care – skip!)

If you haven’t skipped ahead, then let’s continue with the hard stuff. And**** those other bastards, we’re better off without them.

In my own philosophical theorising, my great inspiration was Immanuel Kant, who wrote about the nature of the nature of knowledge and perception. Like Leibnitz, Kant was a philosopher who went out of vogue but whose ideas are now at the heart of the modern scientific enterprise. And I was also influenced by one of Kant’s most inspired followers, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote about the “primary imagination” which creates the reality known by our senses, and about the “secondary imagination”, the source of poetry itself, which owes its power to the fact that it is a shadow of the primary imagination.

Coleridge’s formulation was a beautiful poetic restatement of Kant’s carefully argued philosophy which showed that time and space themselves are constructs of the mind perceiving. Which means:

Every day we create our world anew.

Every time we wake, the world springs up around us. We make it so. For a few seconds after waking, there is typically a fog of confusion. But then we remember who we are, and what we plan to do today, and what we did yesterday and in the years before. And a whole network of associations, assumptions and predictions springs into place to unify and control our perceptions. Even time itself only exists because we perceive it as we do; even space is a product of how our minds apprehend the atoms and quarks and superstrings of underlying reality.

This isn’t the same as solipsism. If you and I and the rest of humanity did not exist, there would still be an external universe. Lions would still scent their prey; flies would still be able to find and wallow in shit. But grass would not be so evocatively green, and roses would not smell so delightfully sweet, and nothing in our extraordinary world would have the special beauty and the unique range of meaning that the human perceiving consciousness not only perceives, but creates by its very act of perception.

And so, I argued, our primary imagination gives us the power of a god, to create a world and Universe rich in memories and anticipations and emotions. You Are God, as I pithily phrased it in the subtitle of my book.

I am God too; we are, each of us, Gods of our own personal Universe. Nothing about reality is a given; we have to really work to make it happen…

And the radical aspect of my new approach was to apply the principles of emergence theory to this whole area of consciousness study. If we accept that “reality” is a movie screened in the consciousness, it gives the human observer an active not a passive role in his or her private Universe.

And this connects up with the attempts to replicate the nature of human consciousness in computer systems, as “artificial intelligence”. But my equations reached deeper, by embracing the “primary imagination” and its ability to fashion a coherent Universe in which time passes and space has extension and all events have emotional resonance and are tinctured with memory and anticipation.

This was my introductory section, in which I argued that consciousness itself is an example of emergence; and that therefore reality itself (which is created by consciousness) can also be described according to the equations of emergence theory. The rest of the book was devoted to case studies of “mental systems”, taken from memoirs and biographies and autobiographies of famous and not so famous individuals whose ways of seeing were expressed through emergent equations.

Many of these individuals were sociopaths and serial killers – Ted Bundy was my favourite example. Albert Walker, perpetrator of the so-called Rolex watch murder, was another of my intriguing case studies. The choice of criminal case studies was primarily due to expedience, since there is a such a wealth of psychological information available on dysfunctional killers.

The main body of the work consisted therefore of psychological anatomies which didn’t ask the usual questions about such people – but instead, described them thoroughly and scientifically in terms of their ways of processing reality. Psychopaths, at one extreme, process reality in a way that is denuded of emotional content; often, killer psychopaths admit they don’t really feel emotion, but instead “act” emotion. Great novelists, by contrast, process reality by a process of self-glorifying self-fictification. Computer geeks, by further contrast, break down their lives into a series of tasks and challenges; it gives them huge self-confidence, but little emotional competence.

Throughout my book, I interwove equations and poetic insights; I psychologically anatomised great artists, but also monstrous killers; I blurred all the boundaries between art and science and between different areas of science.

And then I heaved a deep sigh, sent the book off to my publishers, and waited for adulation to come my way.

It never did. The book did in fact get published, and it received a healthy amount of press attention. It even got a few mildly favourable reviews. But in the world that mattered to me – the universe of academe – the book was roasted. The whole community of the scientific establishment rose and cast stones at my essential premises, and derided my sometimes half-baked equations. Philosophers mocked the naivety of my treatment of Kant, which failed to acknowledge the perils of Platonic essentialism. Computer geeks identified flaw after flaw in my “critiques” of computer systems.

Two men in particular rose to the forefront of the critical hostility. Both were eminent scientists – Professor John Gallagher of the University of Iowa, and Dr Ralph Cutler of the university of Auckland. They listed all the errors of fact in my admittedly overambitious analysis of emergence from the moment of the Big Bang to the birth of human consciousness. But in mocking, they also refined. They adapted. They, frankly, stole wholesale from the insights and ideas in my book. When, fifteen years later, Gallagher and Cutler jointly won the Nobel Prize for their work on emergence theory and human consciousness, there were few indeed willing to point out that they took their original starting point from my own work of pop science. They won the Nobel Prize by stealing my insights. But You Are God, my life’s work, barely even registers as a footnote in the history of science.

And so, as has happened so many times in my life, I did all the work, but got none of the credit.

And I seethed, of course, at the negative critical response. I knew I should have done as Newton did, and as Darwin did; hugged my insights to myself until I had properly and carefully checked every single detail and observation. But I did nothing of the sort. I was swamped by the material, but also exhilarated at my sense of progress. So I rushed into print, bollixed entire sections of the book with specious extrapolations of valid premises, made countless errors, and lost a large measure of academic credibility.

And yet I was right. Read the book. See for yourself. I was the shoulders on which giants clambered, in ruthless pursuit of the main chance. I was the stepping stone, who got stepped upon. I was the fool.

But curiously, not everyone mocked. The book got a wide general readership, and developed a cult following comparable to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Tao of Pooh.

And among the many fans of the book was a man called John Sharpton, who was at that time Commissioner of the UN Police Force. Sharpton recommended the book to a number of his colleagues, who all loved the very detailed case studies of psychopaths, which were full of rich and practical insights into the criminal mentality.

And, as a direct result of this, I was offered a new job, and a new career. Sharpton called me into a meeting and, to my utter astonishment, offered me a job as scientific adviser to a worldwide Crime Task Force devoted to the neutralisation and incarceration of target nominals – the “big fish” of international crime. This was of course based on the main body of my book, the case studies of psychopaths and criminals – not the philosophical underpinnings, which the coppers all found impenetrable. But as far as these senior policemen were concerned, I was a “boffin”, an expert. And so they wanted me to join their crack crime investigation team.

I said yes immediately. I was so excited.

I was a thieftaker!

I bought a leather bomber jacket.

And I looked like an idiot in it. But it seemed to be the right style code for my new job, my new vocation.

My boss in the crime-busting squad was Detective Superintendent Tom Greig, a kindly, tall, powerful, overwhelming giant of a man. I met him in a cafe near Victoria, and watched with goggle-eyed respect as he ate not one but two cooked breakfasts in front of me, without ever pausing for breath or ceasing his rat-a-tat briefing on what my job would require.

Tom saw that I was nervous, indeed panicky, but he reassured me enormously with his gentle, old-fashioned manners. He adopted me as his “sexy boffin” and treated me with a courtesty and respect I had never before known.

Within a month, this gorgeous hunk of a man was also fucking me. I could hardly believe my luck.

A week after that first meeting, he introduced me to the rest of the team, who were based in an office near Tower Bridge in London. There was Tosh, a beer-bellied Glaswegian, with a fondness for practical jokes. There was Mickey “Hurly-Burly” Hurley, who was a wide boy, and a wisecracker par excellence. There was Michiyo, a sleek graduate who was a martial artist and languages specialist. “Blacks” was the computer geek; Rachel was the sergeant, the team leader, the sorting-everyone-out one; Natasha was a Ghanaian princess with more charisma than any one person deserved to possess.

We became a tightly knit team, a collision of unlikely opposites. I was teased for my sensible shoes and air of restraint; they loved to call me the Prof, and shock me with their bawdy humour. Our squad room was a hive swarming with foul invective and casual insults. It could not have been more different to the academic environment to which I was accustomed. I learned to use the word “motherfucka” as an endearment. I discovered that “twat” could be an adjective. I even, to my own amusement if no one else’s, developed the knack of cursing in iambic pentameters.

Five astonishing years followed. The aim of our squad was to identify, harass and psychologically destroy the world’s top criminals. These were our “target nominals”. They included South American drug dealers, Mafia capi, Eastern European oligarchs, Chinese Triad bosses, white-collar fraudsters, coordinators of paedophile rings, gangster paramilitaries, death squads, and more many more. There were no jurisdictional rules; we could operate in America, Europe, Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa – anywhere. There were no rules of fair play either; once we had targeted a top criminal, we used all the means at our disposal to subvert and shatter them.

Hate mail.

Random tax audits.

Psychological game playing.

And, most commonly of all… Mental warfare. The art of mind-fucking.

For instance, Wong-Kei, the Chinese Triad boss, worked out of Beijing and came from a long dynasty of gangsters, people traders and pimps. One hot March morning Tom briefed us on his history. We watched videos of his victims. We studied flowcharts of his criminal empire. And we made our plans.

First, Michiyo went deep undercover in his organisation. She became a drug mule, carrying heroin in condoms that she swallowed and carried in her colon for days on end. It was a horrendously dangerous assignment, and we had a team of paramedics constantly trailing her. But as a result of her courage, we were able to get access to the inner reaches of Wong-Kei’s organisation. Michiyo never met the boss himself, but she met his underlings, and she visited all the hangouts and bars used by members of his crew. And, everywhere she went, Michiyo sprinkled microscopic self-replicating bugging devices. Every hand she shook, every cheek she kissed, she left behind a trail of molecule-sized radio transmitters that could only be removed from the subject’s skin by intensive steam jets and chemical baths.

Before long we had an audio bank giving us the ability to instantly eavesdrop on the conversations of all Wong-Kei’s henchlings. Michiyo herself was rushed to hospital to have an enema treatment that flushed out the deadly condoms. For the next six months, she walked with a stagger and slightly bowed legs.

Meanwhile Tosh and Rachel coordinated a surveillance operation that allowed us to create a compellingly detailed psychological portrait of Wong-Kei and his family and his many lovers and illegitimate children. Blacks coordinated the whole affair, creating computer patterns of bewildering complexity that uncovered hidden connections between the smallest facts.

And then I went to work. I read the phone-tap transcripts, I studied the photographs of his daily movements. I read his emails, I scrolled through photocopies of his private coded diary. I learned the life stories of his former lovers, his present lovers, his friends, his employees, his children. I psychoanalysed his parents and his brothers and sisters and childhood friends.

And I converted all my data into complex emergence equations, and came up with a game plan to destroy him.

My tack was to play on the fact that Wong-Kei was deeply superstitious. So we haunted his daily life with bad omens. We poisoned his meals with psychotropic drugs, to induce hallucinations and panic attacks. We forged apocalyptically bad horoscopes and smuggled them into his home. We trained black cats to walk across his path. We installed a mirror in his favourite restaurant that did not show his reflection. (But then removed it before other diners noticed.) We stole the bones of his grandparents and crushed them into ash and sprinkled them on him as he slept. (Later, during a routine police DNA test, Wong-Kei was stunned to learn that the skin of his face was tainted with the DNA of his long-dead grandmother.)

Then we moved to stage 2. We spread rumours that he was a sexual pervert who had abused his grandchildren; and we watched his marriage shrivel.

I knew this would happen. I knew his wife was already suspicious of him, and feared he was sleeping with under-age prostitutes. And I knew also that Wong-Kei was haunted by sexually explicit paedophile dreams that made him deeply anxious about his own sexuality. (This was on the basis of an employment questionnaire he completed at the age of twenty-three, together with a conversation with a man he had just met in a bar in Beijing when he was thirty-nine and had just consumed three large Remy Martin brandies, together with my deep psychoanalytic reading of a short story he wrote as a nineteen-year-old at university.) And I knew that Wong-Kei would never be able to sit down with his wife and honestly discuss the lies being told about him. His pride would not allow it. His father had always told him, “Never discuss your personal affairs with your wife. Merely tell her what you are going to do.” And those instincts, so deeply ingrained, made him deeply vulnerable – at a time when the constant bad omens he was encountering made him fearful of everything.

And thus, at every stage of our campaign, I was guided by a knowledge of the man so intense, so detailed, I felt at times like his God, meticulously assessing him at the Last Judgement. I knew his favourite colours, the flowers that annoyed him, the words that grated on him, the fact that he loathed having people sneeze in his presence. I knew his every psychological blip and blemish.

Our slow campaign of persecution worked. Wong-Kei became forgetful, bad-tempered. He neglected his ageing mother. He slapped and brutalised his younger sister, then abased himself in remorse. He started to forget vital facts – on several occasions, he struggled to recall his own favourite beer. And he found his libido dipping dangerously.

And, as Wong-Kei’s mind slowly unravelled, so his judgement started to slip. His normally tight security measures became more slapdash. He began to feud and bicker with other Triad bosses. He accused a close associate of being a queer. Dissension sprang up in the ranks.

This is when our Pick Up team came into action. They launched a conventional “sting” operation against Wong-Kei and allowed him to implicate himself. Bereft of his usually astute judgement, Wong-Kei blundered and floundered and was easily suckered by the crudest of police set-ups. And when enough video and forensic evidence had been gathered, Wong-Kei was arrested and charged by officials working for the World Police Federation. Our people weren’t involved, we were never seen, never gave evidence in court. We did not exist.

And even Wong-Kei himself had no idea that his personal failures and weaknesses had been induced. He blamed himself. He assumed that he had been going through a mid-life crisis. Half-way through his trial, he committed suicide, and his organisation was taken over by his nearest descendant, Billy Shen. Billy we knew of old. He was one of our best informants. And so we ran him, and through him we ran the biggest Triad gang in the Far East, for two whole years. And then we made some more arrests, let Billy go, and started up a massive surveillance operation. Slowly his empire crumbled – thanks chiefly to information supplied to us directly by Billy himself, the supposed gang boss.

A power vacuum was created; other gangsters began taking over Wong-Kei’s wrecked empire. New maggots replaced the maggots we had killed. But never again did a Triad boss have the unfettered power and authority once enjoyed by Wong-Kei.

And our work continued… and with each new assignment, I grew in confidence and expertise. I became a pioneer of a new kind of criminal investigation. I was the master of computer systems which could describe and collate every character flaw and foible in even the most complex individual. I would study witness statements and learn the target’s fears, his or her favourite fantasy during masturbation, the content of the websites the target had visited in the preceding ten years, the clothes the target wore, the target’s love affairs and friendships and secret dreams and aspirations.

One of my favourite jobs involved the “virtual destruction” of an eminent merchant banker who for decades had been engaged in money laundering and the selling of stolen artworks. His name was Robert Roxborough.

Once again the team set forth to acquire all the information we needed. Michiyo and Tosh went to work in an art gallery owned by a Portuguese philanthropist called Ramon. Phone taps were placed on all of Roxborough’s employees and families and the prostitutes he employed were astutely analysed and interrogated. And, after all of this, I put the information into my people matrix and came up with a strategy to destroy him. I quickly decided that Roxborough was too astute and well balanced to be mentally undermined in the way that Wong-Kei was. So I went for a more subliminal approach.

I arranged for every painting in Roxborough’s private gallery to be smeared with the aroma taken from a dog’s sweat gland, mixed with human sexual pheromones. Then, for ten solid weeks, I arranged for him to be followed every day by dogs super-saturated in the same aroma. Wherever he walked, the dogs followed. So he stopped going into parks and out into the streets, in order to avoid the dogs. But in his gallery too, the same stench in the back of his mouth stifled him. And yet, though it disgusted him, the smell made him rampantly horny. Every time he looked at a Poussin or Jackson Pollock or the work of some gifted new artist he was championing, he was overwhelmed with a sick sexual frenzy.

At the end of ten weeks, this sad specimen didn’t know whether to fuck his paintings, or collect feral dogs.

And as a consequence, Roxborough developed a phobia for artworks of every form and description, and quietly resigned from the art-theft game.

Then I had his pocket picked; and in the lab, I planted a slow-release gland to disperse a different aroma onto the banknotes and credit cards he carried in his wallet. Then the wallet was restored to his pocket, less than twenty minutes later. The gland did its work; the faint but impossible-to-ignore smell seeped on to his money and credit cards. This particular stench was a brilliant concoction made out of putrefied maggots and mashed-up human corpse flesh. And so from this point on, Roxborough would associate money with decay and death.

Eventually, we had him arrested him for a series of offences – we had more than enough evidence stockpiled. But we kept the game going as long as we possibly could. Because punishing this man wasn’t enough – first, we wanted to spoil the bastard’s fun.

Then we moved our attention to the East. The Eastern European oligarchs were divided into four major factions, bonded by a common interest despite different ethnic backgrounds. They observed a strict truce interrupted by random assassinations. It was a flawed peace, but it worked.

So we raped a gangster’s daughter.

The “rape” was, of course, a virtual one. The daughter’s name was Anya; we paid her a million dollars to make up a story of being abused and raped by a dozen Russian gangsters. Then she quietly slipped to the West and made a new home in Minnesota.

Anya had in fact, according to the police medical report, been brutally sodomised over a number of years and had survived several bouts of gonorrhoea. This, we deduced, was a product of her father’s wayward notions of child-rearing. But nonetheless, the father, Grigori Valentin, when told by his daughter of her gang rape, was deeply outraged at the insult to his first-born child. And when independent evidence came his way that the leader of Faction B had authorised and actually participated in Anya’s rape, Valentin went ballistic. Gang war was declared. Most of the members of Faction B were bloodily assassinated.

Then Faction C received evidence that Valentin had been informing on them to the American FBI, and Valentin himself was brutally murdered.

After six months of bloody warfare, Faction D quietly stepped in to scoop up the spoils. By this time, however, our surveillance devices were planted deep, and we were able to build up a comprehensive case against Faction D. Mass arrests ensued and the age of gang oligarchy was over.

Thus, peace came to Eastern Europe. By the year 2055, democratic governments independent of organised crime were sweeping across the whole of Eastern Europe. Albania became a beacon of prosperity, famed for its nanotechnology and spellbinding modern architecture.

And Anya Valentin died at the age of 104, renowned as a school principal of deadly asperity and feared wit, admired and loved by generations of schoolchildren in the little Minnesotan town she had made her home.

I so vividly recall those squad-room days; and I still have audio tapes of the banter and the briefings which, in my later years with the squad, I downloaded every night from the microchip in my hearing aid. Hurly-Burly had a tender side, he was always very protective of me, and had the sweetest friendship with the stunningly unsociable and socially disconnected Blacks. Natasha was fierce, full of rages, but learned to treat me like a maiden aunt rather than as a sexual rival. (That woman was such a whore…)

And I remember Michiyo, at our office party, singing a cappella karaoke hits from the 1970s, with an unexpectedly powerful soul voice. I remember Rachel, the day she was shot in an abortive arrest attempt, laughing it off in her muttery casual way. She was back at work in two weeks; she used to love taking her trousers off to show off the scar on her left buttock. And there was Tosh, a borderline alcoholic who regularly forged interview transcripts which ended with the words, “At this point DI Greig battered the wee fecking suspect.” Tosh had been suspended three times for tampering with official documentation, and each time he laughed loudly and long. Tosh was, I learned many years later, a bigamist; but both his wives were bitterly neglected. He spent his life in the office, with his team. That was his world.

I can conjure them all up with a simple thought-prompt, even without the aid of the audio tapes. I can feel their presence, their energy, their stupid scurrilous humour. And I can still vividly recall Tom making love to me, naked and panting, orgasming, whimpering, sleeping afterwards. Just with a thought, I can put him there again, even though it is… oh, so many years since we last met or spoke. He died, of a stroke, at the age of ninety-two. I didn’t attend the funeral. I wasn’t, by that point, attending funerals.

But while he lived, he had such life. Such zest. The stories he told… his effortless assumption that you would want to listen to whatever it was he wanted to say. His command of a room. “This is a really good story,” he’d say calmly, and pause. And the room would hush until he was ready to tell it.

After five years the squad was disbanded, amid murmurs of disgrace and corruption. Tom was, of course, fabulously corrupt, and left the force a wealthy man. I resigned too and went to live with him in Dorking, England. Within six months we were driving each other insane. So I caught a plane to Florence, to swot up on my art history.

And it was there, in the Piazza Signoria, looking towards the loggia where the stone Perseus was lopping off the Gorgon’s head, that I felt myself becoming overwhelmed. My breath rushed into my throat. I was hyperventilating. I was in pain. For a moment, I assumed it was Stendhal Syndrome, that I was simply overcome by too much joy.

The truth was more prosaic. I speed-dialled for an ambulance and a cardiac arrest kit. Then I hit the ground – hard. Paramedics were with me in minutes, and certified me clinically dead.

I was put on a life-support machine. The ventilator kept my brain alive, as my heart shuddered and spasmed. I had died, but now I was reborn.

And so began the next phase of my long long life.

I never wanted to live for ever.

But there’s a good chance that I will.

Health has always fascinated me. Largely, I suppose, because of my lack of it. When I was five I had to wear glasses. When I was nineteen, I started to suffer from hearing loss, and from the age of thirty-one I was regularly using a hearing aid. And, of course, my skin was regularly subject to burning and scarring in the light of the sun.

So I tried to turn these weaknesses into advantages. After years of wearing chunky glasses, I was eventually able to purchase a pair of toric multi-function soft disposable contact lenses that fully corrected my vision. These were “smart” lenses, able to adjust on a daily and even hourly basis for the needs of the eye, and the environs. With these lenses, I could see perfectly at night; I could read fine print that was invisible to 99 per cent of people with 20-20 vision; my eyes were never dry or dusty; I could even, with some fiddling, amplify my vision to the level of a pair of cheap binoculars.

These lenses cost me almost six months’ salary, but I felt it was worth it. Then, when my deafness got worse, I cajoled the university’s medical insurance department into paying for me to have a pair of inner-ear hearing aids to replace the chunky clip-ons I’d originally been allocated. These sleek plastic tubes slipped easily into the ear itself, and moulded perfectly to the contours of my inner ear passage. Ever since they’d first been introduced – in the early years of the twenty-first century – these digital hearing aids were computer-adjusted and tailor-made to amplify only those frequencies that the wearer had difficulty hearing. So the sound quality was flawless. And, with some fine tuning, I was able to improve the accuracy of these hearing aids so that I could follow a conversation taking place at a table on the opposite side of a crowded restaurant. I could eavesdrop both sides of someone’s mobile phone conversation. I could, literally, hear a pin drop.

Then, when the second edition of my book was published, sales went through the roof and my fortune doubled. It helped that I was now a semi-glamorous figure – a “consultant to the UN Police Authority”. It helped, too, that by this time I had gained a few pounds – enough to stop me looking like a starved librarian – and changed my dress style. I’d become, almost, sexy; the book was a massive hit; and I became rich.

And I kept working on my gadgets. I was one of the first to improve the smart contact lens data-carrying capacity; and I was a pioneer of attempts to create wireless connections between remote computers and the smart lens’s “brain”. I did the same with the hearing aid. I purchased a massively expensive subvocaliser, which allowed me to access computer programs via signals sent from my earpiece – by simply articulating my requests subvocally.

And I worked out at the gym. I had my breasts non-surgically boosted – not excessively, just enough to give them a sensual curve and an exciting nipple flourish. I took a melatonin implant to shed the freckles, and acquired a pleasing all-year-long golden glow. During the last few years of working with Tom and the team, I was no longer a pale, skinny nerd – I was a sleek, bronzed, busty nerd. For me, the psychological difference was immense.

Then, after the squad disbanded, I had my heart attack; and when I recovered consciousness, I insisted on having a smart heart installed, instead of a biological pig’s heart. The smart heart was made of bioplastic; it automatically regulated and monitored buildups of deposits in the arteries, and it had a phenomenal pump capacity.

Tom came to see me in the hospital – but capriciously, cruelly, I wanted nothing more to do with him. I could tell he was hurt – I could see the pain sag through his proud body. But I felt, you see, different. I was a new woman. Tom was a part of the old Lena; so I cut him out of my life.

And then, a few months after leaving hospital, I started training. I ran, I lifted weights, I did yoga to relax, I made my body my temple. Before long I became fit; then very fit; then frighteningly fit. With this new heart, I could run a mile in three minutes, and not be out of breath. My physical strength was increased twofold, because of the increased efficiency of oxygen flow in my muscles.

And with my new heart, I knew that I need never fear heart attacks or strokes. Microbe-sized ionised probes in my bloodstream were analysed each day by the heart, and any irregularities broadcast to a medical computer. Heart and artery problems could be solved long before they actually became problems.

The new heart cost me 2 million euros. I bankrupted myself to buy it. But then, of course, I wrote another book, based on my ideas about emergence, but now refocusing all these ideas into a self-help manual. Naturally, I wrote it just for the money; and it made so much money. The book was called You Are God 2, and it featured photographs of me clad in Lycra, outrunning athletes.

As a result, I became a sex goddess, and an internationally famous self-help guru, the ultimate Before and After Makeover Person.

With the money I made, I was able to fund my ongoing process of self-renewal. Some of the techniques I tried were quasi-experimental; I became a guinea pig for the Anti-Agers. And so, at the age of fifty, I had the body of a thirty-five-year-old. At the age of fifty-five, I looked like a thirty-year-old. And by the age of sixty-one I had the body of a gorgeous, hot, seductive twenty-five-year-old.

I became a founder member of the Nematode Society, devoted to promoting pioneering research into how to reverse the ageing process. The trick is to realise that ageing is not a natural process; self-renewal is the natural process. (Think of the skin, which sloughs off layers and then grows afresh every day of our lives.) But through a process of natural selection, which of course favours reproduction over survival, organisms have evolved mechanisms that hinder the self-renewal and regeneration of the cell. To put it another way: as human beings, we have “death genes” that program us to degenerate and die. It’s Nature’s method, if I may be whimsical, of clearing the garden to make way for new crops.

But if we isolate these genes, and replace them with cell-renewal genes – the Perpetuity genes, as they are now known – the body itself becomes able to regrow limbs and even brain cells. In a perfectly regulated Universe, I always idly thought to myself, the human being would be like a worm – so that if you cut a man in half, both halves would regrow into fully formed human beings…

In practice, it doesn’t entirely work that way. If you lose a leg in an accident, it’s much easier to buy a new one from a lab than to grow a new one of your own. There are sects that doggedly insist on doing things the Natural Way – they have ceremonies in which they lop off fingers and even arms and then wait decades for them to regrow. But, in our busy consumer-led world, it’s easier by far to purchase over-the-counter limbs, eyes and ears than to, as it were, do it yourself.

But the Perpetuity gene still has a vital role to play; through a series of coded messages distributed throughout the body by RNA, the gene replenishes and regenerates internal organs, it eradicates cancer, and it keeps arteries clear.

It cures baldness in men too. And that, if I may say so, is such a boon.

To continue: I wasn’t, of course, the only one to be taking advantage of anti-ageing technology. Many others were doing the same; my point here is, I was the first. Or at least, one of the first. One of the pioneers.

I am now nearly a thousand years old, subjective elapsed time. I still have the body of a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old. I am the third-oldest human being in the entire Universe. And the other two, trust me, look weathered and tired.

I’m the only one. The only one to be so old, and yet look and feel so young.

I created Heimdall.

But none of those fucking bastards ever properly acknowledged it.

It’s the same old story. It happened to me in academic life time and again. When I reorganised the university library system, creating an online database of unique fluidity and versatility, I was thanked, curtly, for my administrative efforts. But the creative kudos all went to the head of IT. In the official history of the university, it was his name not mine that headed the folder on “IT Revolutions”.

When I was at school, I always came second in History. Not because my essays lacked the necessary rigour or originality. It was because my nearest rival, Clarissa, had charisma and gorgeous hair and perfect skin. I once swapped one of my essays for one of Clarissa’s, on line; and my essay with her name on it got a score fifteen points higher than my previous best.

Why is that? Why do some always get the credit, while others get downgraded? Do I have some special knack, some sign that says, “Undervalue me”? How come, to get back to the matter in hand, that in the history of the Heimdall virtual bridge, I’m the fucking Trotsky?

Not that I’m bitter.

I admit, of course, that the scientific groundwork for Heimdall was laid down by others. I’m not the Einstein, or the Dyson, or the Fermi, or the Lopez. I was, by that time, in my fourth or fifth major change of career, the elected President of Humanity. For nearly a hundred years I was the most powerful person in the Human Universe. I created peace, harmony, understanding.

And Heimdall.

Heimdall is, of course, a quantum artefact. Its essential principles relate to the well established concept that a quantum state in one part of the Universe can affect a quantum state in another part of the Universe, simultaneously and without any passage of time.

Scientists call it – I feel you flagging here but please, bear with me, this is the very structure and essence of the Universe we’re talking about, so if you fail to grasp this paragraph you might as well be, frankly, pond slime, or a laboratory rat – the principle of wholeness, or entanglement. Which means that whenever two systems have at some previous moment interacted (or entangled), their description is tied together no matter how far apart they may subsequently be. And a datum that is true of the one system, will be true of the other system also.

But since all the Universe originated in a single near-infinitesimal singularity – in its pre-Big Bang golden idyll – every part of the Universe was at this very earliest moment entangled with every other part. And that connection persists, despite the subsequent expansion of the Universe. It’s like twins separated at birth and raised in different countries, who remain empathetically or even telepathically connected.

And so quantum theory allows an amazing loophole to the law that says nothing can travel faster than light. The exception says that i nformation can be conveyed instantaneously, whatever the distance involved, if it’s information about a quantum state between two previously entangled quanta.

But to get any value out of this hallowed principle of physics, you have to be able to manipulate the quantum states on both sides. Not by much. You just need the difference between Quantum State A and Quantum State B. Which is the difference between 0 and 1. Which of course is the basis for a long-distance digitised computer connection, capable of communicating information instantaneously.

And so, once you have your two quantum state controllers in place… distances vanish. An email sent in Australia will reach Africa the very instant it is sent. It won’t be quick, it won’t be fast; there won’t even be a millisecond of time elapsing. It will be instant. And so it becomes as easy to send an email from Australia to Africa as it is to send one from London to the other end of the galaxy.

And thus, as a result of these discoveries, the Universal Web becomes possible. Video phone calls can be made between planets, without even a momentary delay. And all this is made possible by the “quantum state manipulation nano-computers” which were christened, by me, Quantum Beacons.

The snag is that there’s a huge amount of work involved in setting up this means of communication. The near Beacon is always on Earth or in the Earth system, but the distant Beacons have to be literally flown through physical space to the desired remote location. In a metaphorical nutshell; the telephone wire has to be hooked up at both ends.

I was, I have to admit, one of the first to realise the great value and potential of all the decades of difficult theorising into the field of quantum communication. And I believe that the construction of Heimdall was the greatest accomplishment of my Presidency, tarnished only by the memory that the scientists and the explorers were given all the credit, whereas my role was… sorry, sorry, I should move on.

To continue:

In order to create Heimdall, a fleet of spacecraft was built. (This was before my time, I concede.) Each ship was massive, and constructed with total redundancy. Nanocomputers were installed to do the work; but every system had a backup, every backup had a backup. And each ship was crewed by five hundred potential space colonists, with a cargo of human sperm and every conceivable seed and animal embryo in deep store.

The first vessel in the fleet was called the Mayflower. Tragically, all five hundred crew members died in deep space, after a collision with a dark-matter tornado. This was a phenomenon we hadn’t even known about until it killed the world’s finest men and women. The names of those five hundred are engraved in a plaque in New York Plaza, and in my heart. And in the history books.

But even though the crew was dead, the computers carried on sailing the spaceship. On and on it went on its long journey. Using state-of-the-art fusion engines, it could reach speeds of almost two-thirds light speed.

After fifty years the Mayflower stopped. Its cargo of human embryos was unfrozen and carefully grown by robot nannies. Seeds were germinated and planted. A Quantum Beacon was built by the pre-programmed robots and nanobots. And, once it was installed, instantaneous messages could be transmitted between the Mayflower in its new home, and Earth.

And after that, vidphone and webcam links were created. Robots were then remotely built in humanoid form, complete with touch and olfactory sub-programs. We could now see everything the robots could see, and feel what they felt, the moment that they saw or felt it. Which means: It’s as if we were there ourselves. Suddenly, space had shrunk… with the help of virtual technology, a citizen of Earth could find him or her self on an alien planet.

This first Quantum Beacon planet orbited a star which I named Asgard, after the home of the Norse Gods. And the virtual link that connected us was called Heimdall, after the Rainbow Bridge that connected Asgard with Earth.

And meanwhile, all the time, other colony ships were landing. Other Beacons were being built. And the map of space was filled with the dots of human settlements…

It took four hundred years for Heimdall to become the masterpiece it now is. Quantum Beacons are dotted across all of known space, and the virtual Rainbow Bridge that is Heimdall allows instant communications between all the regions of humanity.

And, all those years ago, actual control of the first space colonies was literally in my hands, and in my eyes. With the help of a virtual bodysuit connected to robot bodies on the colony planets, I could walk on alien soil. I could move tractors across arid plains. I could choose the music that played on the colony’s intercom, I could devise menus for the children who I was growing there. I could do anything!

My focus in those early years was almost exclusively on the colonists of the Asgard star system. I named their planet Hope, and it became my joy. I studied them, and encouraged them, and help shape their society.

But I was at pains to be sure that the new colonists did not ever become resentful of their “master” in a faraway land. The settlers of Hope were my children, not my slaves. I became the perfect parent; all-seeing, all-protective, indulgent, and immune to insult.

And much to my delight, the new colony of Hope turned into a wild and dangerous place. It was the first civilisation in human history to have only one generation, grown from embryo by robots with unerring care. All the babies were babies together; they all went to kindergarten together; and they all graduated to primary school level together. And then they became teenagers together; they were thirteen together, they were fourteen together, they were fifteen together.

And thus, the children grew into adulthood. Every inhabitant of the new colony had the same birthday, the same emotional and mental age. And, knowing that the Quantum Beacon was a constant source of information and wealth, a virtual safety net, they ran riot together.

For five whole years the colony of Hope was a drug and sex and rock and roll Utopia. No useful work was done. Wild oats were sowed. The “accelerated maturity” process became a joke, as the colonists spent the years between fifteen and twenty either stoned or drunk or delirious with sex.

Well, good luck to them I thought. I myself, I must concede, had the dullest-ever teenagerdom. So, by proxy, I was now sowing my own wild oats. Through vidcam and virtual-reality links, I followed the lives of my children, I watched them get spaced out, I watched them fuck, I watched some of them play suicide games that tragically ended their infinitely promising lives. I watched, but I didn’t meddle. I merely waited until my children grew into maturity.

And then I gave them independence. With independence came power; with power came a sense of responsibility. We still kept, through our robots and virtual-control programs, a grip on the mineral and energy wealth of the new colony. Solar panels orbiting Hope’s sun pulsed energy that fuelled its space factories and telescopes. And spaceships travelling down the Beacon’s path carried valuable raw materials back to Earth on a regular basis; the first cargoes took sixty years to arrive, but after than, a cargo ship arrived every three months. All this allowed us to run an Empire with infinite resources, infinite power.

On Earth, we had everything we could possibly desire. So why be greedy? Why dominate, why control, why bully? Why not let the children of Hope have their total freedom?

Why not?

Why fucking not?