Debatable Space

Lena

I was in retirement on Earth, living in my son’s palace, and basking in my sixth century of life, when we first found the Bugs. I passed my days reading Dickens and Hammerfast and the collected works of Bjorn Ishil. Then a new Quantum Beacon was installed in the region of Epsilon Omega 5, and we were able to witness at first hand the experience of the colonists when Human first met Bug.

At first, we all thought it was a plague. All two thousand settlers developed fevers. Then they stopped speaking English. Then they cut holes in their spacecraft and floated through space stark naked, with no visible side effects.

By this time we were running the colony ship with the ten Doppelganger Robots we had in storage. Peter asked me to advise the Major Incident Team on how to manage the plague crisis. I watched as DRs attempted to subdue and incarcerate one of the human beings. The human waved a hand and the DR fell into two pieces.

Then the human looked at the vid camera. We watched on our screens as his eyes bulged. His cheeks inflated. Then he exploded. Every part of him shattered into the tiniest pieces. Until nothing was left. He was possessed by invisibility, and destroyed by nothing at all.

Soon after the ship melted. Every particle of it was transmuted into raw energy. Our nanoprobes were able to follow some of what happened next. The DRs now floated in space with the humans, as part of one vast colony. Out of seemingly nothing they constructed a vast net in space. And there, like spiders in a web, the humans and the DRs coexisted.

Then a new spaceship appeared out of nowhere. It was similar to the one that had melted, but bigger, and sleeker.

We had three more colony ships in the area. We gave them their instructions. They formed a triangular pattern around the galactic core. They activated their Quantum Beacons.

And we sealed off the whole region. A Quantumarity was created, a quantum-effect singularity which has no substance or energy but which allows nothing to penetrate its boundary. And thus, we contained the plague. And then we watched as the crew of the two colony ships – who were, of course, trapped inside the Quantumarity – died appalling deaths.

The second death we witnessed on camera was even more shocking. It was the ship’s doctor, a blonde woman, whose fevered eyes suddenly clouded black. A million tiny insects crawled out of her eyes her nose her eardrums her nostrils and every pore and bodily orifice. They swirled around her like flies. Then the insects ate her alive, until all that was left was a pillar of floating insect that formed the shadowy shimmering shape of a human being. Which then moved.

The insects swirled and vanished then reappeared. This time the human-shaped swarm was more fully developed. It had a nose, breasts, fully shaped limbs. The skin was still black and suppurating but this impersonation of a human being was uncannily accurate.

Then the insects swarmed again. And a letter appeared in the air. Followed by another, and another. And we read the chilling words, written by a swirling swarm and suspended in air:

By now, our scientists had fathomed that these insects could not be insects. They were much much smaller, the size of a microbe, or conceivably smaller still. But they were microbes that could swarm and form insect shapes that acted with a collective intelligence and purpose. And the insect shapes could swarm and form larger shapes. And could communicate with us by forming letters in the air…

It was, after all, a plague. A plague of intelligent Bugs that could possess and annihilate a human being in instants. These were Bugs that could learn the English language in a matter of days. They could eat a spaceship. They could build a new spaceship out of particles so small the human eye could not perceive them. They were tiny, they were evil, and we were their prey.

Someone leaked the story. And the world erupted into panic.

That panic has never subsided. All human history was changed irrevocably by the discovery of the Bugs. All the work I had done to create a better and a fairer and a well regulated Universe was abandoned. The military-industrial complex took control. A thousand warships were outfitted on a yearly basis, each equipped with a Quantum Beacon. It took the first of them ninety years to reach the Epsilon Omega region. And once there, they used their Quantum Beacons to create a second impenetrable shell around the first impenetrable shell. The warships, of course, were by now trapped in place, on the wrong side of the impermeable wall. And so the trapped soldiers bred and raised children to be soldiers in turn.

These became our Sentinels; human beings whose only function and reason for being was to guard against the possibility of a Bug invasion. If that event ever happened, of course, the soldiers would die instantly, since there was and is no defence whatsoever against attack by sub-microscopic Bugs. They can go anywhere, penetrate any hull, crawl into any weapon.

But since they were trapped anyway, the Sentinels were led to believe they fulfilled a vital function. They lived, and still live, a life of pointless folly; sustained only by purpose-built religions which allow them to exist in a state of Messianic zeal. Their futility is known to everyone, but not to them…

A thousand impenetrable shells have now been constructed around the Bugs’ planetary system. All of mankind’s resources have been poured into making humankind safe from Bug. But to generate that wealth, and sustain that endless war drive, other considerations have slipped down the order of priorities. Democracy was lost centuries ago. Liberalism is a distant dream. Humankind exists on a permanent war economy, and government by diktat is now the only way.

The region outside the thousandth shell has come to be known as Debatable Space. In Debatable Space, half the sky is warped and twisted, because of the bizarre effects of the Quantumarity. And all humans who live there exist in a state of foreboding and dread because of the twisted sky above them, which serves as visible token of the Bug Threat at the heart of the Thousand Shells.

There is no law in Debatable Space. It is a wild place. It is the place of final escape for pirates and outlaws.

And I loathe the place, beyond all measure.