Debatable Space

Flanagan

My dream was to be a musician. I studied Spanish guitar, electric guitar, jazz guitar, fusion-techno guitar, keyboards, composition. After I escaped from my home planet of Cambria, and I’d got my head free of all the shit that happened there, I spent twenty years working on my music. I composed, I played, I mastered new instruments, I worked seven days a week, getting ready for my launch on galactic television. I lived and breathed music.

Blues, boogie-woogie, reggae, hip-hop, techno, garage, Cuban fusion, bluegrass, flamenco soul and electro-soul, numusic, Jig Jag, gospel – I was the acknowledged master of all the revered historical musical styles. Modern styles held little appeal for me, I was the king of retro. But I was filled with an exhilarating sense that, by some magical process, I was creating my own musical synthesis. I was combining style with content, soul and rhythmic energy, and I wrote lyrics that cut and shredded the listener with their passion and which oozed and dripped and slimed sarcasm and attitude. My combo was called Flanagan’s Band, and we were going places.

Then my wife and children were wiped out by an asteroid strike.

We were living at the time on the planet Pixar, one of the “Free Worlds”. It was a warm, pleasant planet with gorgeous lakes and no seas. Pixar had two moons, and was subject to terrific tidal forces that caused regular flooding. But we all lived in houses that converted easily from outdoor to underwater living. And there was something about the air… it was oxygen-rich, low in impurities, and the act of breathing it in made you feel good.

Then the asteroid hit us. It was an astonishing, epic catastrophe, which for the inhabitants of Pixar was totally unexpected and beyond our wildest imaginings. It led to the extinction of millions of species and the end of civilisation on the planet. The atmosphere leached temporarily into space, volcanos erupted, entire continents ripped into segments, and the resulting earthquakes spewed up the planetary depths on to the surface.

I was off-planet at the time, doing a gig on a space station in orbit around Pixar’s sun. But my wife Janet, and my son Adam, and my daughters Claire and Adelaide were all on the planet. They were, I guess, obliterated within the first ten minutes. I can only hope they didn’t know what was happening to them.

And when I heard the news, I literally couldn’t believe it. I became almost psychotic in my scepticism, convinced the Universe was playing a practical joke on me. Then I replayed the vid footage and I wept. An entire world died… and all of my family died with them!

After this appalling catastrophe, there was mourning throughout the inhabited universe. Emails of condolence came from the remotest planets in the human domain, and the Government of Earth declared a day of mourning, in respect and homage to the dear departed.

Then the conspiracy theorists started up. They whined and whinged and sent hysterical and fantastical texts and emails across the galaxy, in their usual (hysterical, fantastical!) fashion. According to these nutsos, the asteroid strike had been predicted decades before. But the Galactic Corporation decided to let it happen in order to give Pixar a more interesting and mountainous geography.

And thus, according to these insane, delusional conspiracy theorists, the powers that be knowingly allowed tens of millions of humans to die in order to landscape a planet.

All sensible folk scoffed at these wild allegations. The Cheo himself gave an interview and carefully disproved every one of the claims made against his administration. He was astonishingly persuasive and charismatic, and his approval ratings soared.

But I believed every word. I knew, from my own experiences as a child on Cambria, that there is literally no limit to the evil of the bureaucrats who run the Corporation. They are heartless, ruthless, entirely without remorse or humanity. They are infinitely blessed, infinitely powerful, but they are also savage, bloodthirsty, murdering, raping, greedy, profit-drenched, psychopathic monsters.

No limit whatsoever.

And so I watched the news coverage intently as, after the asteroid struck, the Galactic Corporation began its rescue operation. Survivors of the collision were forced to burn their dead for fertiliser. Galactic Corporation engineers moved in to reshape the planet as a global resort. The ice caps were melted to create a warm brilliant sea. Continents were broken up into islands with picturesque coastlines. The prevailing Pixar sentient species (a two-headed earthworm) was exterminated, and replaced with new species including colourful flying parrots, dolphins, herds of Purr (catlike herbivores) and genetically engineered clawless koalas from old Terra.

I left Pixar, and I played a gig on a space liner in a neighbouring solar system. My Spanish guitar with hip-hop rhythms was an unqualified success. I sang a blues song too, about an asteroid miner who lost his heart, his lungs, his liver, all four limbs, his ears and his eyes in a series of terrible accidents, replacing them in turn with ramshackle and fairly unreliable prosthetic equivalents, and whose sad lament was entitled “ At Least I’ve Still Got My Own Balls ”.

I went down a storm, but I couldn’t help feeling I was in the wrong line of work. After all the horror and injustice I had experienced in my childhood, after the trauma of losing my wife and family in what was meant to be one of the civilised parts of human space, I was still trying to make a living as a rock star…?

So I loaded up the ship’s lifeboat with a year’s supply of stolen vintage wine, and made my escape. I was an outlaw from that day on.

And now, I’m Captain of a pirate crew.