Debatable Space

Book 9

Excerpt from the thought diary of Lena Smith, 2004

I have wasted a lot of years.

I have been drunk, drugged, lazy, stupefied, and just plain idle. Like Samuel Beckett, I once spent a year in bed. Like Winnie the Pooh, I have gorged myself until my stomach has bulged. I have also, aimlessly, foolishly, doodled away entire months doing nothing apart from tidying and making a mess and tidying it up again, a little differently.

Most galling of all, I spent two hard desperate years writing a novel into which I poured my heart and life and soul and entire family history, and which I showed to people whose opinion I respect. They all hated it. In fact, I lost some of my dearest friends because of what they considered to be the dreary drabness of my writing.

So I turned, again, to drink and drugs. I spent ten years as an addict and had to have a liver transplant. I snorted coke and bought a new septum. I mainlined and OD’d and mixed crack with LSD and ecstasy and almost died, several times.

But I knew what I was doing. I was pacing myself. I knew I had a long life ahead of me. I wanted to be sure I left no experience unexplored.

For in my time, I have sky-dived. I have scuba-dived. I have had gonorrhoea. I have been a high-class prostitute. I have been a professional gambler. I have had sex with a movie star. I have read A La Recherche du Temps Perdu in the original French. I have listened to and appreciated every single symphony and major work by Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Chopin and Sidelman. I have spent a year in China. I have spent a year in India. I have spent numerous years in Italy. I have been a step-mum to squawling babies and angry toddlers. I have been unfaithful. I have been faithful. I have committed murder. I have been to jail. I have been brain-fried for my crimes, and I have survived with my rage intact. I have escaped from prison. I have white-water-rafted and I have been a fashion model. I have been a good mother. I have been a bad mother. I have been burgled. I have been flayed, twice. I have been a thief. I have written, as I said, a deeply underrated novel. I have composed several symphonies. I have learned a dozen languages. I have been a concert pianist. I have written best-selling academic books. I have had friends who are transsexuals and homosexuals and celibates. I have loved, and been loved, and I have had my heart broken more times than I can count.

And for almost one hundred years, I was the leader of humankind.

That last part sounds unlikely, I know. Even now, it seems like a dream that such a thing could have happened. I have lost touch with the person I was then: focused, political, manipulative. I networked ceaselessly, eighteen hours a day and more, in person, on the phone, and by email. I wrote game plans of objectives to be achieved and day by day, month by month, I ticked off my successes. And by this means – carefully, ruthlessly, cynically – I achieved ultimate power.

It came about, in the first instance, because of my experience with Future Dreams. After experiencing the very worst of human corruption and injustice, I was left with a burning urge to change things in the world. Admittedly, it was decades before I did anything about that urge, and I drank a lot of margaritas and screwed a lot of men in this delightful interim. But the seed had been sowed. And it finally germinated.

I was unemployed, a recovering alcohol and drug addict, and I had just been betrayed by a philandering man. So I called up all my contacts in the hope of getting academic work – and it was a complete washout. So instead, randomly, I applied for a job with the UN. And I became a junior manager of a UN-funded project in Portugal. This was, of course, after the Worst Hundred Years, when the collapse of the ecosystem had caused astonishing devastation and loss of life across the planet. For much of the time when I had been drinking and taking drugs and having sex, Florida and Spain were flooded, Central America was devastated by malarial infection, and much of Europe had turned to desert. However, huge progress had been made in restoring the Earth’s damaged biosphere. And the UN was pioneering the recovery process.

So for sixteen years I laboured with the other UN workers to heal the land, cure the sick and reseed the empty oceans. It was an extraordinary, exhilarating time; we all knew that we were doing something genuinely good. And in this period I had a glorious sense of what it was to have the nationality Human. We were all bonded together, in a joint enterprise; and day by painful day, our world was saved.

But once the principles of ecostability were more fully understood, the pace of progress increased. Vast floating carbon traps cleared the air of man-made emissions. Plankton swarmed in the oceans. Cod replenished and filled the seas. Frozen helium chilled the poles, and the ice froze again. The equilibrium was restored; the Earth started to heal itself.

And, as the years went by, I felt ambition crept up on me. Once the crisis was over, most of my work became repetitive and clerical and mundane. I knew I had the experience to do more than I was doing – and I yearned to be the leader and not the led.

So I applied myself to that task, with all the focus of a heat-seeking missile. For the first time in my life, I made it my objective to climb the greasy pole. And I applied all my talent and knowledge to that single, soulless task.

I undermined my rivals with psychological gambits. I worked on my skills and my contacts and I ceaselessly, endlessly, flattered those who might be of use to me. I worked long hours, I flirted with my Portuguese boss and even had sex with him a few times. I became a socialite and a gossip. I was promoted from deputy manager to manager; I was transferred to a new project in France; and from there I became a member of the UN hierarchy, on a roaming global brief.

And within seven years, I became Deputy Vice President of the UN during a time of great political upheaval.

In my first year in this new job, I wrote a definitive paper on the new world order, in which I tried to analyse with scientific precision the problems facing mankind – and also the solutions. Energy, I concluded, was the answer to most of these problems. Others agreed. And a year later, a superconductive energy pump was invented which, when placed in close orbit, could convert heat from the sun’s rays into invisible beams of energy that provided near-limitless power to fuel our consumerist technological society.

Four years later, I resigned from the UN and became a British Member of Parliament. I had a constituency in Greenock, and I gave my maiden speech in the house on the subject of urban regeneration. I wrote a column for a newspaper, I campaigned on behalf of consumers and factory workers. I appeared on comic quiz shows and became a cult figure.

And after thirteen years of this relentless hard work, I became Leader of the Opposition.

Five years after that I became Prime Minister. I had my photograph on the staircase next to Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown, Matthews, Thomas, Jones, Durbridge, Smith, Andrews, and McQuist. I dined with the Queen, I opened factories, I traded insults at Question Time, I feuded with my Chancellor, I put a brave face on economic adversity, I pandered to Middle Britain, I gave approval for a vast underground motor and railway to join Glasgow, Cardiff and London. I did, well, really, all sorts of things. I have a list somewhere. I should be prouder, I suppose, though after this long distance of time, all I can remember is that most British MPs drink formidable quantities of Scotch whisky and pride themselves on being raconteurs, even when they aren’t.

And then, after four years in office, I shocked everyone by resigning in order to launch my campaign to be appointed Ambassador for Humanity. This was a new job created as a token sop to liberals who urged an end to nationalism and factionalism. But in my view, it was a post which offered wider horizons and greater challenges than being the cat’s-paw of the Liberal Democratic Socialist Alliance Party.

I got the job as Ambassador. And I felt like a hawk with a healed wing. After all the petty backbiting of British politics, finally it felt as if I had a proper job. I soared and pounced and soared some more. And after a while, I changed my job title to “President of Humanity”.

Once self-appointed in this way, I went on to run the Council for the Improvement of Humankind. And I became, through force of personality, and sheer weight of groundbreaking ideas, the de facto leader of the human race.

Talk about goal-oriented! All it takes is drive, stamina, shamelessness, a shit-caked tongue, and a modicum of ability.

As the first-ever President of Humanity, I had a new office built for me in Brussels, with 3D wallpaper that could be transformed at the clap of two hands into a map of the solar system. I explored the limits of my new expense account. I learned how to power-dress.

And I studied the art of how to rule the human race. I read every book I could think of – from Machiavelli to Plato. And I adapted the principles of political governance by referring it back to my People Matrix based on the emergence equations I’d created so many years before. Using those equations instead of blind instinct, I forged a new way forward. I devised a computer program that would allow me to map and extrapolate political changes before they happened. I was able, therefore, to foresee and prevent revolutions in France and Louisiana. I forged a pact between China and Japan. I defanged the neo-cons of America, already discredited after their failed policies of the early twenty-first century. And I created an elite corps of aides who acted on my behalf with all the ruthlessness of Tom and Tosh and Michiyo and the others in the old days of the World Police. I never killed my political enemies; I merely discredited, undermined and humiliated them.

Those were the days…!

And it was during this period that we launched the second wave of space colonists. I was forced to say goodbye to my beloved son, who had been (once again) accused of rape. I had to falsify his records to get him aboard, to expunge all evidence of his assorted crimes, but I did it with a clear conscience. He was less dangerous in space, I argued to myself, than back here on Earth.

And when he had left, I became acutely aware that my life’s work had to be finding a way to secure the future of those colonists who had risked so much for an uncertain step forward for mankind.

A few years later, the first wave of colonists achieved landfall, on Hope. The very first Quantum Beacon was built. And Heimdall started to come into being. I was ready for the challenges thrown at me. I was the right person, at the right time, in the right job.

I had a simple philosophy of power, which I called the Pournelle Doctrine, after one of my favourite writers. The doctrine is this: Problems have solutions. Mass starvation in Africa is caused by lack of resources, lack of water, corruption and war. So I helped turn the African nations into self-contained energy-generating commercial entities with fertile fields and vast underground industrial estates. Dictators were punished with loss of trading rights. Greed triumphed; and thus, wars started to vanish. Financial corruption was replaced by dependency on the joys and exhilaration of a twenty-third-century lifestyle.

I created a complex system of virtuous circles where non-malign behaviour was rewarded with greater health, wealth, and longer life. Poverty was eliminated by endless energy resources. The population explosion was – as Pournelle himself prophesied all those years ago – a self-solving problem, because as wealth increases, family size decreases. Even the issue of land was becoming less and less of an issue, as we sent colony ships of Palestinians and Eastern Europeans into the brave new lands of space.

I was, essentially, a passive-aggressive dictator. I controlled every aspect of the behaviour of everyone on Earth; but I presented the facade of being the follower of humanity’s dreams. Like an old-fashioned wife from days gone by, I made all the decisions, but let my sap of a husband believe that he was running things.

And yes, I admit I had my vanities. The name change was one. From Lena to Xabar. I dressed in tight-fitting shimmering plasto-leather suits, I cultivated an image as a woman with a dangerous past. I played a role really – I reinvented myself as an ancient warrior chieftainess in modern times. I was Boudicca, I was a cartoon heroine, I was Xabar. In a world dominated by grey and middle-aged politicians, I was the candle, and I was also the flame.

This was, of course, all calculated. I packaged my essence up into a series of connected myths and sold them all, all at the same time. I sold the myth of the obedient servant of humanity; and I sold the myth of the sexy dominatrix. I sold the myth of the ice maiden warrior princess who could kick male ass; and I sold the myth of the nurturing, gentle, mother/sister/lover. I was alpha, beta, gamma and omega, all rolled into one. I was left-wing, right-wing, conservative, liberal, sluttish, puritanical, dangerous, safe.

It was politics as prestidigitation, sizzle not steak. But there was a steak. There was substance to what I did. I wasn’t, as some argued, a bimbo apparatchik. I was a visionary. But a visionary in a sexy suit, with a weird name, and a knack of being whatever people wanted her to be.

Then, after about twenty years, the look changed. I became more severe, more forbidding. As my policies became more liberal, my look became more starched. I wore stiff suits and disapproved of nudity in television commercials. I became Nanny – fair, firm, but innately puritanical and moralistic. That worked, too, for a good while.

Then I appointed a good-looking Vice President and for ten years or so, it was assumed that he was the power behind the throne. It was rumoured we were lovers, and that I was going to stand down in favour of him. I can’t, for the life of me, remember his name. I can easily look it up, but I choose not to. When my policies started to run into difficulties, he became my fall guy. He left, I stayed. Life carried on.

Of course, each nation on Earth had its own ruler; and each country was sovereign, and powerful. My role in “Presiding” over the Council of Humanity was simply to coordinate and liaise. But the reality was, leaders of nation states came and went. They lost at elections, they were assassinated, they died of heart failure. But I stayed – constantly reinventing myself, and my role. And in this way, I became for a period almost all-powerful.

At first, I travelled constantly. But as time went by I relied heavily on my vidscreens in my office in Brussels (and, latterly, in an annexe of the Houses of Parliament in London.) I was, of course, spending every night in the virtual reality of Hope, inhabiting the bodies of Doppelganger Robots as a frontier was tamed, and a planet was terraformed. So when my days began, my head was pounding with memories of sandstorms and appalling deaths and great heroism. But I developed a knack of effortlessness that allowed me to glide through paperwork and answer phenomenal numbers of emails. I vidphoned a hundred messages a day and buzzed them out in batches. It was rare for me to have actual conversations. I preferred people to pitch me proposals by email, so I had time to simmer on them; and then I announced my decisions.

And so we savoured the twenty-third century, the period in which the human race changed for ever. Microchip brain implants became standard and so virtually every human being had access to all the knowledge of all the ages. Bodies and faces could be changed like suits, with the vagaries of fashion. The first genetically engineered humans appeared – the “gillpeople”, who could breathe in oxygen through water, and who were eventually evolved into the Dolphs. There was a whole new generation of 100 Plusers, wars were unheard of, the distant planets were being colonised. Boxing was outlawed. Prostitution was taxed at a higher tax band. Children were maturing faster, learning faster; teenagers were force-fed knowledge, but in their twenties the new generation of “twoers” experienced the sheer joy of a gap decade before entering the world of work.

The famines in Africa were a thing of the past. After the catastrophic climate disasters of the late twenty-second century, the climate was now in a state of stable homeostasis, no longer oscillating between global warming and Ice Age. Music was, frankly, shit; even by my standards. Popular and classical alike, music was well and truly up itself. But painting had entered a renaissance, and wall murals of staggering beauty by the world’s greatest artists covering whole city blocks and skyscrapers could be found in every capital city.

And the problems of the human race were being solved. They were being solved. Problems have solutions; you just have to find them.

The pressure on me was, however, phenomenal, and my workload was crippling. And after nearly ninety years in power, I began planning my retirement. But first, I ushered in my repeal of the penal laws – which meant the eradication of prison in favour of electronic and behaviour-modifying torture as a punishment for offences. The “brain-frying” of armed robbers and murders proved to be chillingly effective. Crime plummeted; and those who used to be career criminals lived their lives in a state of semi-fear, haunted by memories of the excruciating pain generated by our cortex-searers and imagination-burners.

This, too, whatever later critics have said, was a solution to a problem: namely, how to stop criminals committing crime. One solution is to incarcerate them at vast expense for long periods of wasted life. The other is to hurt and terrify them so badly they are physically unable to sin again. Under my scheme anyone who committed a serious crime – murder, rape, kidnap, paedophilia, grievous bodily harm, armed robbery, or malicious extortion – would experience brain-frying. And anyone who became a repeat offender would be brain-fried daily, until either redemption or brain damage was achieved.

It was cruel; but it worked. And, coupled with advances in forensic and thought-exploration technology which made wrongful convictions a thing of the past, it was fair.

This was my brave new world. Mock it if you like; but I lived a long long time in the old world. And my world is, trust me, a billion times better.

It was a strange and wonderful period. But looking back, I wish I had found myself some friends. People who could stand up to me, defy me, argue with me. Instead, I had legions of loyal acolytes. Eager beavers who were young and anxious to cling to my coat-tails. None of them were over the age of forty; all of them secretly plotted to take my job.

But there was power enough for all of us. I hired one young man, Matt Evans, who called himself Mat X, after hearing his rap lyric on an album I downloaded on to my earpiece. He had such energy, such wit, such coruscating irony. So I called him into my office and quizzed him on what he would do to solve the problems of the world. He was an angry and passionate black man who spoke, angrily and passionately of course, about the shit that is dealt to blacks and mixed-race communities in today’s fucked-up society.

So I made him Coordinator for Africa. His mission was to make Africa into the richest, coolest nation on Earth. He had the resources, he had the staff. And he had no fucking idea how to run an office or do a job; even getting up in the morning was a strain for him.

But he learned, fast. He was streetwise, smart, a great people person. He sat down with African dictators and he visited mass graves created as a result of the frequent genocidal wars that were still taking place on a regular basis. He invoked the spirit of Mandela, but he also brought a young new energy to things. Secretly, I controlled his every move; but I used his charisma, his youth, his rap-artist credibility, to win hearts and minds. Billions of young blacks who hated authority idolised Mat X. They listened to his words; they admired his style; and they marvelled that he released his official Manifesto for African Redevelopment in the form of a ninety-minute rap single.

And as a result, we got Africa in shape. It became what it should always have been; a fertile land rich in ideas and culture, in which cooperation between disparate tribes is ingrained in the heart of every native-born ’frican. We called it “the ’frican way”; it was not quite a religion, not quite a philosophy, but it became a way of life for billions.

China was tougher. Eventually, I found a young woman who was abnormally empathetic; her ability to seemingly read minds and predict behaviour allowed her to introduce democracy and reform Chinese social practices. She later became a Demi-Goddess, revered by entire nations; and of course, by that point she was no longer returning my phone calls. Her name was Xan (you see, she even copied her silly name from me). Ungrateful bitch! Sorry. Moving on…

Problems have solutions. It was my creed, my Machiavellian code. Yet the curious thing is: amnesia is the driving principle of all human behaviour. When things are bad, everyone will yearn for them to get better. But when things are good, it’s all taken for granted. And so entire generations grew up in my world assuming this was the natural order of things. Full employment, barely any disease, long lives, few wars, a warm and emotionally invigorating architectural environment – big deal! The world was still shit, and adults like me were arseholes and fossils to be mocked and despised.

So maybe there is one problem that lacks a solution. Maybe human beings are just Not That Nice. They are selfish, venal, they have no gratitude. I did so much for the human race; but what has it ever done for me?

Why, for instance, do I find it so hard to make female friends? And why do the men who are my lovers betray and patronise me? And why is it I keep having to fake orgasms? And how come no one ever laughs at my jokes?

What the hell is wrong with me?

She brought her death upon herself.

Though I can’t deny I was wrong to do what I did.

But how can it be, in a life lived so long, with so many good deeds to my credit, after so many years of self-restraint and self-denial and altruistic commitment, that a single trail of wrongdoing can be traced and tracked and used to destroy me?

I admit my sin: I bribed officials to cover up my son’s rape of a young woman. And later, despite other rape investigations, I used my official position to quash any police allegations into his conduct. I pulled strings, and falsified records, and eventually got my son sent out into space where, I hoped, his wicked streak would burn out.

And Congresswoman Cavendish, the scourge of liberals, made it her life’s work to find me out. She began with the assumption that I must be guilty, of something. She didn’t care what. She was a religious fanatic, a bigot, a hater of people of colour, a Muslimophobe. And for most of the last thirty years of my long tenure in power she attempted to destroy me with one fraudulent accusation after another. I found myself wearying of her lies, her black propaganda. And I could not think of an adequate solution to this, my own particular and painful problem. Her hatred of me was visceral, intense, and it kept her alive. Without the aid of rejuvenation therapies, which she disapproved of, Cavendish reached the age of eighty-eight with her energies undimmed, her hatred of me unslaked.

And finally, she found a smoking gun. She found out all about Peter and my continuing role in concealing his criminality. The scandal broke, and I was disbarred from office.

I can remember vividly the moment when it all ended for me. It was a Thursday. Or a Wednesday? No matter. It was morning. I’d just finished a cup of strong coffee. I opened up my emails, and found one that had the subject line: You have been impeached. I rose, stunned, from my desk and walked numbly out of my office… and Cavendish was there in the corridor to greet me. With an army of officials. Gloating. Gloating!

At Cavendish’s insistence, I was formally censured in front of my colleagues by the Arbiter. My papers of office were ceremonially ripped up. It was all done by the book, in accordance with hallowed traditions. Except I knew it was all bullshit. I was the first person to hold this particular office. We had no traditions.

But Cavendish had her way. I was humiliated. And, in the months that followed, as I read the press coverage, I realised that piece by piece my reputation was being stolen. A new President of Humankind was elected, and the impression was created that mine had been a caretaker administration. I had been not much more than a glorified civil servant; now a real politician was in charge.

To combat this torrent of lies, I leaked stories, I briefed journalists, I called in every favour I was owed. But every time I thought I had a handle on how the game was played, the game tilted and I was utterly humiliated once again. I read entire books that argued that the triumph of the planet Hope was a victory of plucky settlers fighting against the meddling interference of jumped-up civil servants back on Earth – namely, me. I read that my principles and protocols of office were created by the person who succeeded me – a nonentity called Luigi Scarpio, who combined astonishing charisma with utter ignorance of science and was devoid of morality and common sense. Every achievement or insight or policy advance I had ever made was credited to someone else; every mistake or fiasco or instance of corruption which had occurred during my tenure was blamed on me.

The people loved Scarpio. He was homespun, funny, a bit tubby, he liked to mock his own fondness for pasta and Italian women. Scarpio became a legend. Whereas I… I became a footnote.

Cavendish had won; I had lost. And so, I admit, I lost control of myself. My rage was intense. I tried suing her for libel, I tried tarnishing her own reputation. And then, eventually, in the full knowledge that she had a terminal illness that would end her life in less than nine months, I obtained an illegal gun and I went to her house, intent on murder.

I stood outside the house, whipped by cold winds, trying to control my breathing, for six long hours.

Then I smashed in the back door and went in. The burglar alarm was blaring. I was handling this all wrong, I could have been so much cleverer. A poison dart, a sabotaged car, a hitman.

I blundered onwards. Here I was, the former most powerful woman in the world, seized by an irrational rage. How could she do this to me! How could she do this!

I spent ten minutes playing “Sardines”, hunting for an old lady hiding in a big old mock twenty-first-century mansion. I discovered her eventually in the linen closet. When she saw me, her face uncrinkled in relief. “They’ve gone now,” I whispered. “You’re safe, come with me.”

She held out her hand to me.

And I shot her, repeatedly, in the body, till I was deafened by her screams. Then I blew her brains out. The explosion was awful. I was spattered with Cavendish. The sheer horror of the moment filled me with a childish glee.

I heard sounds at the back door. The police had arrived.

I wiped my prints off the gun, scratched my face on the side of the linen cupboard door, and concocted my cover story, involving masked gunmen and an heroic struggle on my part to save the old lady.

It was a laughably bad cover story. The police charged me with murder. My own lawyer openly mocked my story of having arrived to offer Cavendish my forgiveness and friendship, only to find the aforementioned armed burglars on the premises. She urged me to plead insanity, in the hope of being offered a course of forcible therapy. Instead, I entered a plea of “Justifiable Homicide”.

My lawyer, without my permission, changed the plea to temporary insanity, on the grounds I was totally raving mad and shouldn’t be listened to. She had a point. But the court ignored all our bickering, and I was found guilty of murder in the first degree. Fortunately, however, my lawyer managed to prevent the State from seizing my assets.

I was sentenced to be brain-fried for two days.

I knew exactly what to expect. I had studied this subject intensively, since I had of course introduced this particular punishment into the penal system. Electrodes in the pain centres and imagination centres of the cortex fire electrical currents for between twenty and a hundred consecutive hours. It is intended to be the nearest thing in life to being in Hell.

But I think the night before was worse. Every nerve ending jangled. My skin prickled and itched and I felt as if I was being devoured by insects. I was in the hotel wing of the prison complex, I was well fed, my bed was soft and comfortable. But to know that in the morning you will be tortured is a torture in itself.

My room was pastel pink. It had strange whorly patterns in the wallpaper. Ambient music played, that grated and scratched at my soul. I think it was meant to be relaxing, but for me, it was part of the torment. For years after, I was unable to travel in lifts in case muzak played and I started ripping out throats.

Then dawn came. I was led into another room with equally comforting wallpaper. I was sat down in a chair. A helmet was placed on my head. My hands were restrained. A catheter was hooked into my arm to prevent me dehydrating. I realised I had urinated upon myself, but a nurse came and wiped me down. The “Play” button on the brain-modification helmet was pressed.

At first, it hurt. But I could ignore that.

Then I had an hallucination. I imagined that I was free. Walking across a green field, in the hot sun. Beautiful men and women walked beside me, stark naked. And then I realised my skin was peeling. I was burning in the sun. I rubbed a hot patch, and skin came away and I saw sinews and tendons underneath.

I itched, all over. I rubbed myself. My hair come out, my nose fell off. My heart fell out of my ribcage and lay on the grass, beating hot blood.

It started to rain. But there was salt in the rain, which burned into my raw skinless flesh. The agony was unbelievable. But then my mother appeared, smiling. She picked up my heart and ate it. I felt a pang of betrayal and self-hate. My mother smiled at me, my blood trickling down her jaw. Lightning struck me and sent millions of volts surging through my body.

But finally, it was over. I was clothed now, my skin was restored. I recognised immediately that this was a ruse to prevent me becoming desensitised to pain. I knew I was still in the nightmare. But all my senses told me I was sitting in Starbucks, with a caffe latte and a caramel shortbread in front of me.

I drank the soothing coffee, ate the cake. Don’t do this! I screamed at myself. The taste of pleasure was softening me up.

A man with tattoos sat down at the table with me. He took my hand and sawed off my fingers one by one. “Daddy, don’t,” I whispered at him. He took out a club with spikes.

He beat me for several hours, until every inch of my flesh was tenderised and bleeding. I tried to tune out the pain. I kept telling myself: this isn’t really happening.

The pain continued, and continued. It got worse. And even worse. But eventually it was over. I heard gentle voices speaking to me. My straps were being unbuckled. A doctor was explaining that I was now ready to go into recuperative therapy. I was led out of the room. I insisted on staggering down the stairs, rather than using the lift. We left the building.

“Am I free?” I whispered.

You’re free,” my father told me. “But remember, no more bad behaviour.”

“I promise, Daddy.”

“Lying bitch,” my daddy said, and slashed my face with a razor. He peeled my face off and blew his nose on it. And then he walked away.

A pack of hyenas surrounded me. I was in the middle of Piccadilly, with shoppers walking past. But no one stopped or raised the alarm. The hyenas starting biting at me. I shuddered and shrunk into a ball.

Lightning struck me and seared my body with unbelievable pain. The hyenas ripped my flesh to shreds and ate me.

I was in a lecture, at university. I was wearing glasses! This was the old me, the former Lena, before I became Xabar. I breathed deeply, shaking with relief. I was coming to welcome these respites, at least they…

Everyone was staring at me. With hate in their eyes. “We despise you, Lena,” my fellow students were whispering. “You are pathetic, you are flawed, you are the worst person in the world.”

“Sticks and stones!” I replied mockingly. A foolish thing to do because…

My fellow students proceeded to beat me viciously with sticks wrapped in barbed wire and jagged stones. I gritted my teeth, as the pain escalated, and waited to die so that the next nightmare could begin.

I was in a room, with a blonde-haired eight-year-old girl. She was giggling and playing with a pet dinosaur and a spider that you can move by pressing a rubber bulb. I sat down with her and played. “What’s the spider called?” I asked.

“Spidey,” said the little girl.

“I’ll be Spidey,” I said.

“I’ll be Mr Steggy,” the little girl said. “My granny gave me these toys. My granny is dead now, some heartless monster killed her.”

I looked up and saw Commissioner Cavendish staring down at me. Sorrow and love in her eyes. The little girl’s eyes lit up and she ran to her granny and kissed her. “Gran,” she murmured, “Gran, I love you,” as she hugged old Cavendish. And Cavendish’s harsh face relaxed into the gentlest and kindest of smiles, as she embraced her beloved granddaughter.

Waves of remorse and self-loathing swept over me. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. And Cavendish’s head exploded and the girl was covered in blood, and she started to scream, and scream…

And so it continued. I endured two days of these nightmares, but it felt like ten years. Eventually it ended, but for months afterwards, I was convinced that my life was just another dream, and any moment now, the next horror would arrive.

My “coercive therapy” punishment for murder was the most appalling experience that it is possible for any human being to experience; it’s programmed to be just that. It is a toxic blend of pain, self-loathing, guilt, remorse and physical agony… My soul was scorched and seared.

But the punishment didn’t, in fact, work.

Perhaps I was too steeped in sin. Or perhaps I am too canny, too experienced. But I found that my remorse ebbed rapidly. I am still able, as my warrior exploits have shown, to kill whenever I need to, or want to. I can sleep without bad dreams. My memories of the horror of my torture have been virtually expunged.

I still feel spasms of agony when I least expect it. The pain of my punishment will never leave me. But the sheer joy of that moment will never diminish: Cavendish staring at me with her skeletal, withered face, full of contempt. I show her the gun and the contempt turns to fear and bewilderment.

Then I shoot her in the leg. Then the other leg. Then in the body. Then in the head, repeatedly, so that her brains are sprayed over me. Then I sit and tell her wrecked skull stories of my debauchery until the police make it up the stairs and subdue me. It is exquisite delight. I savour every moment of my soul-degradation.

Why did I do it? I cannot say, I cannot explain. It meant the total and comprehensive end of my reputation, it meant my damnation by posterity.

Clearly, I was mad. But the question that then raises itself is: When did I become mad? Then, or earlier? Was I mad while I was in power?

But then again, maybe I was just bored, and yearned for an experience more extreme than anything else in my long, long life. Murder; incarceration; brain-frying; public excoriation. Well, I couldn’t argue that my life was dull.

After the brain-frying, a psychologist diagnosed me as unrepentant. I was sentenced to another course of treatment. But I bribed a guard, and left the prison disguised as one of the conjugal visitors.

I left Earth that night on a colony ship. Twenty years later, subjective time, I was reunited with my son, who was on a ship heading for Earth.

He led a conquering army. I greeted him like a matriarch applauding her Emperor son. He was completely under my spell. I had no friends by then, I could not afford to make one more enemy.

I was amazed at how confident Peter seemed. He had a swagger, coupled with an easy charm. He had been fantastically successful as a colonist; he had become the leader of his people, he had destroyed an alien species, and he had helped to terraform one of the bleakest planets ever settled by humans. And now Peter was eager for fresh challenges. He was a general returning home, with the intention of declaring himself Emperor.

I was still somewhat crazed when we met. Everything he said seemed normal. But in retrospect, everything he said was utterly monstrous. Peter had become addicted to war; and he made it his life’s work to seek out the cruellest and the hardest way.

I gave him long long lectures on how to rule Earth according to liberal principles, and he paid me not a blind bit of notice. Eventually, feeling myself to be old and tiresome, I bade him farewell. He went his way, I went mine.

I travelled through space a few decades more, and eventually made myself a home on Rebus, the fourth planet of the star Moriarty. Whilst there, I watched the TV footage of Peter’s Earth invasion. I watched as my son installed himself as leader of mankind.

I watched and I understood nothing. By this point, I did not even understand myself. I wrote this, in my mental diary: I do not know who I am, or why I did what I did. I am merely a forward arrow through time. I wonder if I am truly human any more.

Kids! They break your heart.

When he was nine years old I realised I was afraid of Peter. He had tantrums, terrible screaming fits that left me shaking and shuddering for hours afterwards. But there was always that sense that he never really lost control. There was always that still, eerie eye at the centre of the storm.

He didn’t like green vegetables but we had a nanny who insisted that he ate them. He thought this was awful, so he begged and begged me to sack her, but of course I refused. Then he started to wet the bed. I was so ashamed. I had a cleaner of course, but I couldn’t bear for her to see the sheets, so I’d be up in the early hours washing and ironing sheets and replacing them on the bed before dawn. Then he started to wet himself in school. Every night, before going to bed, he would drink a gallon and a half of water with the sole intention of urinating it back up again over his plastic sheets or his schoolbooks. Eventually, I sacked the nanny, and the bed-wetting stopped. Peter had got his way.

To my astonishment, other children always did what he told them to do. It was a knack he had. If he asked a child to jump out of a first-floor window, the child would do so. Numerous broken limbs resulted. If he wanted extra sweets, he would demand that other children give their allowances to him. And no one dared argue with him.

And so the parents of the other children refused to have him in the house. He became a pariah, the child no one wants their child to be with. He once put a dead bird in the drainpipe of the house of one of his little friends. It stank the house out, and the parents had to call the Council round to fumigate. And another time, he superglued two little girls together by their hands. They were too embarrassed to tell anyone for two days. So they just walked side by side together even when they went to the toilet. When the parents found out, they were devastated – at the injury committed, and at their own neglect of their daughters.

Peter was an ugly teenager. His face was pockmarked and scarred with acne. I had to pay for skin rejuvenation therapy to start him off at the age of fifteen with a clean slate, and a face girls could bear to kiss. But at some level, he never lost that ugly face. He always had that cautious look of someone who expects the first reaction of others to be recoil.

He masturbated incessantly. Don’t all boys do that? I suppose they do. But I found it shocking, I was tired of finding damp tissues chucked down the toilet bowl, and sheets that were stiff with the previous night’s emission.

He used to steal hard-core magazines. I was searching his things regularly by then, and I was horrified at the material he read. Coprophilia, necrophilia, other perversions that even now I can’t bear to think about. I took him to a therapist and Peter made false allegations of incest against me just as a joke.

How could a child grow up so bad?

But then, perhaps there are in fact reasons and excuses for his behaviour. And perhaps, after all, I was to blame. Because, even in the period after my encounter with Future Dreams, and the flaying, even when I was well and skinned again, I was never there for him. I had my other concerns. I was preoccupied with work, I rarely came home before midnight. And, of course, I was constantly afraid that Future Dreams would wreak a terrible revenge for what I had done to them. They might send mercenaries to kill me or my child or fit us up for crimes or even, conceivably, murder or rape me in my bed. I was very paranoid during that period. I was also drinking heavily. I was also abusing pharmaceutical drugs and overdosing on rejuves. I was a total screw-up, with a small child. What was I thinking of?

It was all my fault!

But Peter did change. By the age of seventeen, his face was smooth, and he had a ready smile. He was smart and charismatic, and he had learned how to flatter me. He was mummy’s little boy. I basked in his approval.

He took a ferocious interest in the work I was doing He travelled with me round Europe, and Egypt, and Africa. We walked around the Parthenon together, arms linked like husband and wife. But in fact, he was my son. My handsome, funny, clever son.

For a time I forgot, to be honest, about his dark-child years. I smothered him, I pampered him. I never challenged his opinions, though he was inclined to wild supernatural speculations. He never wanted for anything. I catered to his every whim and desire. And I was so proud of him when he said he wanted to be a doctor, and got a place at an Oxford college to study medicine. Then, after he was thrown out of Oxford for assaulting a fellow student, I was so proud he quickly managed to get a place on a BA course in ecology at London Met. Then, when he was sent down from London Met for abusing the Vice Chancellor at a freshers’ networking event, I was so proud of the way he managed to get himself a job in the City of London.

Then, when he was sacked from his job in the City for misappropriating clients’ funds, I was so proud of him when he shrugged off the disgrace and came to live with me, and stayed in bed all day, and drank a lot, and screwed a different woman every night. As long as he was happy, that’s all that mattered.

Then, after about a year of unemployment, he was arrested for raping a girl who worked in Tesco’s. He’d met her, apparently, at an all-night rave. They’d both been taking drugs. She claimed rape, he argued consensual sex. There was some bruising on the girl and the police were keen to prosecute. But I pulled some strings, and paid some money to the girl’s family to encourage her to revise her testimony. Because I believed, of course, that Peter was innocent. I knew he’d been rough with her – but with that much crack in his system, what could you expect?

But a year after the cover-up, Peter calmly explained that he hadn’t, in fact, been on drugs that night. The girl was coked to the eyeballs; but he’d been sober and in control. He’d targeted her, basically, because he knew she wouldn’t fight back. He took her to his room, tied her to the bed, and raped her. And he’d filmed the rape too, as an aid to future masturbation. He even, the bastard, offered to show me the tape.

Peter’s theory of women, which he explained at some length, was that they needed to be melded to the spirit of a superior male. Rape, he argued, was nature’s way of doing just that.

Of course, after hearing all this, I recognised all the telltale signs of egomaniacal psychopathy. But he refused to go to therapy, and he wouldn’t let me contact the police. He made me feel complicit in his guilt. Even now, part of me feels that I am a rapist. By loving my son, I feel a part of every evil thing he has ever done.

But I did love my son. And so I had to embrace and forgive his evil. So I continued to cover up the rape, and continued to persuade myself that there was some good to be found in Peter. He was, after all, delightfully entertaining company.

Peter joined a neo-Nazi party for a while, and campaigned in favour of a Mass Exodus proposal which mean compelling Muslims to leave Earth en masse. His friends were all con artists and burglars and diagnosed psychopaths and fellow neo-Nazis. He had a harem of beautiful girlfriends, who were always going off with other men, and I strongly suspected Peter was pimping them.

We stayed good friends, even when he left my house and took a flat of his own (paid for by me) and amassed debts of tens of thousands of pounds. Once, I had to pay for him to have plastic surgery after his face was burned with acid by a fifteen-year-old girl who, he claimed, had an irrational grudge against him. The girl was later murdered. I have no reason to suppose Peter was responsible for her death. But I never enquired, just in case.

Occasionally, Peter was arrested and spent nights at a time in a prison cell. He never did serious jail time, but he was convicted of being drunk and disorderly, committing ABH, being racially and sexually abusive while under the influence of alcohol, and of running out of restaurants without paying. There were also two other rape investigations, neither of which led to a criminal prosecution. But the police, I could tell, had a file on Peter, and were just waiting for him to make one fatal slip.

I never reproached him. I’d gone past that point. My love was based on damage control. He was still my boy, no matter what.

Then, eventually, while I was President of Humanity a Metropolitan Police major incident team was given the task of investigating Peter. He was suspected of extortion, on-line banking fraud, and murder. The old rape allegation was also being reinvestigated. I used my police expertise to access the incident team files, to follow the course of the investigation on a daily basis. And when it was obvious Peter was in danger of being arrested on serious offences, I used a hacker to delete the investigation team’s files, and ordered the Home Secretary to disband the team and assign them to other duties.

Then I arranged for Peter to join a colony ship, even though there were many others ahead of him in the queue. He didn’t, of course, know how close he was to being arrested and sent to jail for decades. And so he begged me to beg him to stay, but I wouldn’t.

We dined in the restaurant on the Swiss Re tower, looking out over London. “I wish I had the courage to join you,” I told him.

“Maybe I…”

“You’re so brave,” I told him, wheedlingly. “And you’re so right to be doing this. It’s the only way humankind can reach the stars. If young men and women of your calibre gamble with their lives.”

“Yes, but I’m… having second thoughts,” he said to me, a fearful expression in his eyes.

“Which is only natural. But the joy of space… the exhilaration of the infinite!”

“But it might go wrong. We might not find a planet to terraform.”

“They are plentiful. And technology is improving all the time. It used to take a hundred years to make a planet habitable. Now, it can be done in twenty.”

His spirits visibly sank. He could tell I wanted shot of him. “You think I should go then, huh?”

I smiled, radiantly. “It’s hard for me to bear… but yes.”

And I felt a moment of pride about the fact that, for all his many character flaws, I still had and would always have ultimate power over my boy. He would do anything for me. He’d kill for me, if I asked him to. He’d even leave me, if that’s what I wanted, although it clearly broke his heart to go.

And so he left. I had saved him from arrest, and in the process saved my own reputation. I meticulously deleted all evidence of my lies and manipulation at the Home Office and elsewhere. I arranged for the investigating officers on the major incident team to have fat bribes paid into their bank account, from an unattributable source, so that they wouldn’t rock the boat. And, also, so that I would be able to blackmail them with accusations of corruption if they did ever speak out about Peter. (None of them, of course, declared these phantom receipts to their bosses or the taxman.) And then I breathed a sigh of relief.

Because I was glad – no, more than glad, utterly and profoundly relieved – to finally see the last of my child. My love for him felt like a shackle around my heart. I was afraid of him, and dreaded his company.

And, once the colony ship had departed from Earth system, I felt able to return to my normal life. I took lovers, who were always much younger than me. And I took great pleasure in looking at their young, taut, un-surgically enhanced naked bodies. I continued to build my empire of power. And I made the big change, from Lena to Xabar, that made me a legend and not just a functionary.

Twenty years later Peter landfell on a distant planet, and was able to contact me via the Quantum Beacon. It was strange to see him again, via the vidphone. There was a zest to him now, he talked excitedly of the challenges they faced on their chosen home, a double planet system around a yellow G1 star, 16 light-years from the Sol system. Nitrogen-dwelling life forms had been identified on the first planet, and the intention was to declare this a protected zone, and colonise the second planet.

Every week Peter would tell me of his adventures. The nitrogen-rich planet was christened Meconium, and the planet to be terraformed was called Chaos. But Peter always referred to them as Shit (the nitrogen planet) and Shittier (their own hydrogen/helium gaseous low-gravity planet).

This planetary system proved to be a cursed place for the human settlers. The nitrogen-dwelling life forms that had been identified on the uninhabited planet of “Shit” proved to be, in fact, the sentient excrement of much larger nitrogen-dwelling life forms, which were able to expel their wastes through space by means of natural rockets. The excrement was then caught in the gravitational pull of its twin planet (Chaos, aka Shittier) before entering its atmosphere. And this planet, of course, is where Peter and his companions were attempting to forge a new society…

These cosmic shit showers contained the embryos for third-phase life forms which were able to inhabit the helium/ hydrogen planet in gaseous form. In effect, this alien beast was a caterpillar, which turned into a pile of steaming turds, which turned into a gaseous butterfly.

Tens of thousands of humans died in those earlier years, fighting these alien beings, technically known as 421 S (N), which Peter referred to as “Shit Buckets”. Peter was appointed Commander of the colony, and he planned and authorised an operation to detonate fusion bombs all over the planet as part of a controlled terraforming operation that would lead, inevitably, to the genocide of the alien monsters.

I argued passionately with him that they should move on, find a fresh planet. Alien life was a precious thing, to be treasured and conserved. And as humans, we have a duty to think beyond our own selfish needs.

Peter wasn’t impressed. It would take another seventy years of travel to reach the nearest potentially terraformable planet. And besides, this was their home now.

Peter encountered fierce opposition from the leader of his new planet; and so he staged a coup, and after some appalling massacres, Peter was elected as new leader.

The aliens were annihilated. And two oxygen-atmosphere low-gravity Earth-habitable planets were created.

For much of this period, Peter gave me a blow-by-blow account of the dangers he faced. But after a few years, Peter vidphoned home less often. We exchanged vid messages at Christmas; and I was vaguely aware that he was becoming quite a powerful figure in his own right. But I was lost in my own concerns.

And then, seventy years later, my subjective time, we met again in space, during my flight from Earth. Peter had a great reputation by then. He was known as an administrator, an innovator, and a democrat. He was leader of the anti-colonial movement which challenged and defied everything I had ever done in the course of my career. But when we met, he was so charming. He flattered me, and told me that I had achieved great work. He never once quizzed me on my bizarre aberration, my murder of a dying old woman.

He could have psychoanalysed me. It was a tempting thing to do. Who was I really killing, when I killed that old bitch Cavendish?

I was pretty sure, by that time, that I was profoundly mentally ill. But I found that, with the use of medication, and the copious use of deception when in the company of psychiatrists and therapists, I could keep it in check. I was content in my lunacy; in retrospect, I think that period of insanity was a necessary phase. It was a bridging period that allowed me to purge demons, and settle into the next century of my life with a new soul and renewed energy.

So much has happened to me in my long long life. The details are still clear, but the overall story seems vague. I did this, then that, then many other things – but why? What was my purpose? What was my journey? Do I have an arc? The truth is: I simply do not know.

But I did love my son. I did. Grant me that. Despite all his sins.

I loved him.

I was lonely on Rebus.

Rebus was an archive planet, which specialised in the collation and dissemination of data on every conceivable subject. We were encyclopaedists on a grand scale. We savoured every decade in human history. We created video time lines which allowed one to sensually experience life in any given period of fully recorded history. You could sit in a virtual-reality helmet and hear the sounds, smell the smell, see the sights of whatever date or place one chose. With a combination of cctv camera footage, smell data banks, live music archives, police camera footage and the data from Mass Observation video diaries, we could recreate the experience of being anywhere on the planet Earth in any day in any year for the past few centuries.

You could watch Death Star live in concert at the Hammersmith Dance Emporium, even though the band themselves died of electroshock overdoses long ago. You could see Karel Mzniv conduct the New York Philharmonic in a concert performance of La Boheme, with Anne Mitchell making her first public performance. You could be one of the crowd in the Trafalgar Square riots of 2222, fired upon by police, whilst also being pelted with acid bombs by anarchist infiltrators.

You could experience the Rage Riots of 2032, which tore apart the city of San Francisco; and you could watch the astonishing end of Karl Mistry, the leader of the cult New Millennium group. You could watch as a mushroom cloud floated above the city of San Francisco, and feel what it was like to fear that the world is about to end.

With our newer virtual chip technology, you could have sex with the most beautiful men or women in the world. You could fornicate with whores from the planet Eros, five at a time; or build your own perfect lover from scratch.

We also had comprehensive pre-historical archives, with raw film and television footage from the twentieth century, and books, magazines and archaeological records from all the preceding centuries. We had a DVD-Rom of life in Ancient Egypt which combined archaeology with sensory reproduction and would allow you to feel what it was like to be a Pharaoh, or participate in every gory stage of the process of mummification.

This was, indeed, Nerd Heaven.

Rebus was led by a collegium of professors with radical views about the power of information. And our wealth came from selling our data and archive techniques. On a regular basis we were visited by merchant ships bearing untold glorious gifts of a kind that we found it difficult to reproduce in our Space Factory – honey, perfumes, vintage wine, carpets, works of modern and ancient art. And in payment for these, we sold facts.

I was welcomed into the community of scholars on Rebus, because of my academic background, and because of the iconic value of my You Are God books. But I quickly learned that I had a clearly defined place and position in this hierarchy of scholars. It wasn’t an especially low place and position but it was rigidly insisted upon. Decisions filtered down from above; bright, vivid, positively expressed suggestions were passed upwards to the senior academics via the Bulletin Board. In fairness these suggestions were always carefully considered and often heeded. But we were ruled, there was no doubt about that.

I found it soul-destroying. I was trapped into being one person, one role, one place in the hierarchy. And though the work was challenging, I felt I was going back in time. I was becoming the person I used to be, the young Lena. Shy, bookish, intense, solitary, lonely. All my colleagues had a dry, ironic sense of humour. None of them feared me. None of them adored me. None of them, frankly, had much respect for my tenure as the most important politician in the Universe.

I did manage an intermittent love affair with the head of the archive, Professor McIvor. He had silky old skin, weary with lines, and a bassoon voice that he could modulate at will. I flattered him artfully and invited him to share in my dreams of greatness. I argued that we should, together, create a Universal Archive that offered a commentary on all human knowledge from Plato to Schwegger. He humoured me for a while.

But nothing ever came of my plan. Because McIvor’s real passion was for the sorting of existing facts. He could arrange knowledge alphabetically, thematically, and chronologically. But he had no new thoughts to offer on anything. His lovemaking too was confident, and based on tried and trusted techniques for stimulation. But he never lost himself in the heat of passion. He never just was.

I felt that every second I spent with McIvor sucked an ounce of passion out of my spirit. He was rarely boring, always courteous; but somehow he managed to create an aura of order and calm that enveloped all those in his presence, like a pillow over one’s mouth.

Most evenings when we were together we sat and read, or played computer games. The physical proximity satisfied a primal need in my body to be near the sound of another person’s breath, to share in the beating of their heart. But to all intents and purposes, we might as well have spent our evenings alone. We dined, and as we dined we discussed. We made love, and as we did so, and after we had done so, we made pleasant and flattering comments to each other. Then we retreated into our own private mental islands until it was time to sleep.

My dreams at that time were, by the way, extraordinary. I dreamed of worlds in which flesh was liquid and oozed and slithered along earth that was ribbed and ridged and tore at one’s body delectably. I dreamed of having eyes like stalks that turned and burrowed into my ear passages until they entered my brain and saw my thoughts unfolding like a movie. I dreamed of swimming in my own womb, suckling at my own breast, I dreamed of shrinking and dissolving until I became a drop of spittle on my baby’s mouth.

In one dream Tom was alive. We were having supper in a boozer on the Old Kent Road, he was wearing his leather bomber jacket, and all around us were the hanged corpses of the villains we had put away. Occasionally, a waiter would come and serve us a plate of still wriggling flesh from some blagger’s body. Professor McIvor was playing the piano, but he had no flesh on his hands, so we could hear the clicking of his finger bones on the ivory keys.

Every dream ended with me sitting in a chair and being strapped in for my behaviour modification therapy – the brain-frying. At this point, the dream would end, because I had schooled myself to stab my own leg with a pin strapped to my finger whenever the horror of the brain-frying threatened to return. This, I suppose, is why my dreams were so vivid. Because every time I started to re-enter the nightmare universe of the brain-frying, I stabbed myself, and woke, and remembered my dreams, then fell asleep, and dreamed anew.

Each morning my sheet was dank with blood, and my legs were spotted and sore. But I kept the nightmares at bay.

Rebus was, frankly, a drab planet. The gravity was light, and the settlers had populated it with birds, but no land animals. The skies were often thick with eagles and sparrows and vultures and parrots and genetically modified mock-orcs. But the land was flat and featureless and uniformly planted with crops and medicine-synthesising oak and elm trees.

It did, have, however, an amazing air vortex: a permanent typhoon like Jupiter’s Red Spot which stalked the planet like a serial killer. Underground shelters were placed in every populated area for humans to hide from these savage tornados. When the vortex struck, all the birds in the sky hurtled downwards and huddled on the earth in terror and despair. The winds would sweep across the land like scythes of air, ripping up trees and hills and occasionally even denting the supposedly invulnerable human living quarters.

Then the winds would pass, and we would return to the surface. And for weeks afterwards, dust would fall as rain, until equilibrium was once again reached.

But for the most part, the climate was temperate, and so were the inhabitants. And I spent almost all of my time in the library. I found I was even cultivating a cool, measured, slow way of talking, my subliminal response to living on what was in effect a planet-wide public library.

TV was my salvation. When McIvor wasn’t around, I voraciously devoured the Earth soaps and the new drama series from the Second Wave colonies. I could easily watch six hours of television in a single sitting – movies, comedies, reality shows, art installations, I watched or experienced them all, and loved them all equally, and undiscriminatingly.

I watched the news avidly too. I was aware of every detail of the war that had broken out between two non-human species in the O Sector, the Heebie Jeebies and the Sparklers. The Heebie Jeebies are oxygen-breathing carrion-eating fast-moving little skulky things. The Sparklers, by contrast, are carbon monoxide-breathing flying predators which have an electromagnetic inner body that allows them to bioluminesce, and expel lightning bolts. Both species coexisted on different planets in the same planetary system, but knew nothing of each other’s existence until a spacecraft full of Lopers attempted to colonise the system. The sun, a Cepheid variable, proved to be too high in ultraviolet, and too unpredictable, so the Lopers relaunched and tried elsewhere. But as a consequence of their contact with the two alien sentients, an idea-seed was planted which allowed both species to independently develop space travel.

Earth was of course monitoring the possibility that either or both of these species could be a threat to human colonies. But in the first instance, the Heebie Jeebies devoted all their energy to building a space cannon that could pot holes into the Sparklers’ home planet (which the Lopers called, cringe-makingly, Tinkerbell). And the Sparklers, for their part, were honing their bioengineering skills, with the aim of building a multi-organism Sparkler gestalt entity that could launch a massive kamikaze assault on the Heebie Jeebies’ home world, HJ.

It was a preposterous quarrel to the death between a right hand and a left hand; and the news vids covered it exhaustively. I even knew the names of the Heebie Jeebie leaders and generals; and could just about recognise the various members of the Sparkler high command even though, frankly, Sparklers all look pretty much alike.

But soon after that, Earth was invaded; and my attention switched to that long-running reality show instead. (The Sparklers won, by the way, and are now a much-feared space-travelling species. And the Heebie Jeebies de-evolved into non-sentience, a surprisingly common xenobiological event.)

But, reverting to the invasion of Earth: What a marvel it was! Rarely have I been so thrilled by a news event. So much carnage, so much bloodshed. And to think, my own son did all that!

My colleagues were equally enraptured at the amazing events happening all those light years away, which we were able to watch happening contemporaneously thanks to the Quantum Beacon signals. We even found a way to capitalise upon the invasion, by creating brilliantly edited DVD-Roms of the event which we disseminated to every planet in human space (about two hundred of them at that time) via Quantum Beacon. And we marvelled at the ease with which a single mercenary army could capture the home civilisation of the human race.

My son was like a shark in a swimming pool. His fleet was trained in space combat. And his soldiers were skilled and battle-hardened after years of fighting dangerous aliens, and were armed with weapons which were custom-built to cause devastation and wreak genocide.

A battle took place which dwarfed the greatest wars of history. Fleets of warships burned, asteroids were used as battering rams, and laser beams sliced up space stations into glittering shards.

Then Peter’s ships rained fire on the planet Earth, from their position of space superiority. Napalm and acid derivatives were housed in rocket shells which shattered in the upper atmosphere and left the skies denuded of birds for days. Forests boiled and bubbled, and the oceans were coated with an eerie slime that was fatal to the touch.

Fusion bombs were exploded on the Moon, sending chunks of rock flying into space which were then steered back into the Earth’s atmosphere. As a consequence, vast exploding chunks of Moon landed on North America and Australia. The damage was relatively minor, but the psychological terror of it was intense.

And one missile was fired into the Atlantic ocean, ripping through the water and detonating on the muddy bottom, causing a huge vortex to be created that nearly touched the sky. The resulting tornados and tsunamis wrecked and flooded homes and lands on every Atlantic coast.

Peter stopped short of dispatching plagues of frogs and locusts and holograms of the Four Horsemen of the Armageddon, but in every other respect he constructed an invasion that was deliberately intended to evoke and echo Armageddon. There was mass panic, and mass suicide – and entire armies threw down their weapons.

Faced with this overwhelming firepower, and unbelievable psych warfare acuity, the Earth President, a toad of a man called Chapel, capitulated. My son came to power. And thus he became the first person in all of history to conquer the entire planet Earth.

His first act was to abolish the World Council and the office of President of Humanity. Instead, in a glorious public relations coup, he declared that all the “satellite” planets of Earth were, from this moment forward, to be independent and self-governing. Unity would be achieved through trade, as Asimov had prophesied; and the days of imperial rule were over.

He also, in passing, established a Universal Trading Corporation of which he was sole shareholder and Chief Executive Officer. The Corporation’s first act was to charge all planets for information sent or received on the Quantum Beacons. It was, in effect, a massive and lucrative tax on all colonies, but no one realised that. The euphoria on all the inhabited planets of the Universe was intense and palpable. Freedom from Earth’s tyranny!

Sadly, it didn’t turn out that way. The Corporation was not a government; but it had absolute power. And, through the technology of the Doppelganger Robots, my son the Chief Executive Officer (Cheo) became de facto Emperor of the Human Universe.

Years later, he invited me to visit him, on Earth. Naturally I accepted.

As I explained, I was lonely.

I never thought that I would see

Such beauty and such tragedy

And foolish fucked up blazin’ wasted lives

And un’xpected sublimity

I never thought that I would see

So much of life, and of the genius of our universe

Before visiting my son, I got myself a new liver and a skin rejuve. I burned all my clothes and chose a whole new wardrobe from our designer collection. I went for a shiny ochre look with my clothing, and my hair was raven-black. I glowed, I was sublime. And I looked as if I was going to see my lover.

I chose cryosleep for the journey. It doesn’t save you anything – your body still ages the same number of subjective years. But it avoids the tedium of years in transit, playing auto-chess and rereading so-called literary classics.

I was woken when we reached Pluto. In Earth Time I had been away for 130 years or so. And in that time, the grand project of transforming the Sol system had advanced hugely.

Jupiter had rings now. A vast space factory made up of hundreds of separate but interconnected units hung in permanent orbit around the huge gas giant, powered by energy pumps in the heart of the planet’s boiling atmosphere. The man-made ring blended with and accentuated Jupiter’s own natural but fairly anonymous ring system (which of course is invisible to most low-grade telescopes from Earth itself).

Jupiter’s moon Europa is now a gleaming blue and green jewel, after the melting of its icefields turned it into the second of the Aqueous Planets (after Earth itself). Vast green islands have been floated over this planetary ocean, and each year, I’m told, the islands become bigger and bigger.

As my spaceship moved closer and closer into the Sol system, the breathtaking genius of human engineering became ever more manifest. After the glory of Jupiter’s ring comes the magnificence of the Dyson Jewels. These orbiting diamond-shaped space stations are each the size of the planet Mars. And thousands upon thousands of them are caught in orbit between Jupiter and Mars. This is the region of space known as the Beltway, in honour of the Asteroid Belt which used to exist there (before it was pillaged and annihilated for its raw materials).

The orbits of each Jewel are finely calculated and are set at a multiplicity of angles. To visualise this, imagine a sphere with balls circling around it. One ball will circle the equator of the sphere; another will be set at an angle of 5° to that; the next will be tilted at an angle of another 5°; and so on until the final sphere orbits the poles in a straight up and down line. All the balls circle simultaneously, but their orbits only intersect at two points and so with a degree of careful calculation, the balls will never collide.

And so, in this way, the maximum amount of space can be filled by a series of huge orbiting balls, which form a kind of imaginary sphere. And this of course is an extension of the principle of the Dyson Sphere – a theoretical construct of a man-made planet which is mathematically calculated to occupy the greatest possible amount of space. Instead of a planet as a tiny ball orbiting a huge sun – imagine that planet as a vast sphere encircling the sun. Such a place would be vast beyond our wildest imaginings! However, in reality the Dyson Sphere would be inconceivably expensive to build and maintain, and would probably be irredeemably unstable. Niven’s proposed Ringworld is more tenable, but also tricky.

But the Dyson Jewels offer a third and more pragmatic option. Each mini-world is self-contained; but the maximum amount of space around the sun is utilised by their carefully calibrated orbits. They swarm around the sun, magically never colliding, stealing every iota of its warmth and energy. And the Dyson Jewels collectively offer land almost without limit. There is more room for humans to live and roam on in the Dyson Jewels than in all the planets of human-occupied space put together.

Inside each Dyson Jewel is a planet with green fields and blue skies and clouds, and horizons that curve up. And, for those with a head for heights, there are vast viewing areas where the people can look out, into space.

But for the most part, the citizens of the Jewels look in. The Jewels’ rotation creates an illusory gravity; but for the rest, their world is as real as any world. Real grass, real trees, real animals, rivers, lakes and oceans.

And cities that are as organic as a Bavarian wood. In the Jewels, houses grow and deform over the years; streets digress and meander, and sometimes spontaneously give birth to new houses thanks to stylishly mischievous computerised subprograms. Solar power alone is, because of the huge planet-sized solar panels on the hull, enough to give each sphere near-limitless energy. And so each Dyson Jewel has all the resources it needs. Each is a self-contained paradise, which exists in a state of total freedom.

Except, that is, for the contractual requirement to pay weekly licensing fees to the Corporation, which owns the sun’s radiation, and has copyrighted all the energy pumps, and leases all the computer software which makes human civilisation possible.

And, as if the Dyson Jewels weren’t marvellous enough, there is the Angel. An ever-changing man-made Aurora Borealis generated by a micro-star that orbits high above the planetary ecliptic, at roughly the same distance as Uranus from the sun. The Angel sends a radiance over the entire Sol system, illuminating the deepest recesses of space so that the whole system is, in effect, lit by suns at each end.

As a result, uniquely in this planetary system, even in the depths of space it is always daytime. The stars become a gleaming murky haze in the far distance when you are in the Sol system; and the planets themselves shine as though floodlit. For Earth Humans, the sun always shines, and no one ever goes hungry.

I donned a spacesuit and flew from a tether on the outside of my ship as we sailed deeper and deeper into the Earth system. The light of the Angel was reflected and refracted over the diamond surfaces of the Dyson Jewels, making them sparkle in a million different hues. The rings of Jupiter shone with magical resonance. And the natural ring of Saturn had an ethereal glow that sent shudders of eerie pleasure down my spine.

We soared at one-third light speed past Venus (a tropical rainforest now, with civilisations existing on the surface and in the trunk and branches of the Aldiss Tree, which has its roots on the equator but spans the entire planet). We took a long, looping detour so I could see the canals of Mars – this, I felt, was one of the grandest architectural triumphs of recent years, as this barren planet was carefully transformed into a world of palaces connected by long tendrils of water, and in which motorboats and hang-gliders are the universal means of transport.

But then our path arced back again and we headed for Earth, the blue and green central bauble in this Christmas array.

I am old enough to remember the Pessimistic Years, when humans feared that ecological disaster would bring the planet to the brink of destruction. Well, they were right; but out of the wreckage of twenty-second-century Earth has come a revitalised planet, more fecund and more beautiful than ever. The poles have refrozen, the rainforests have been replanted. And the tens of billions who died in India and Africa and Europe and South and North America through a deadly cocktail of global warming, thermonuclear pollution and biological warfare are now fertiliser in Earth’s rich soil.

When I left Earth, much had already had been achieved. Africa was in better shape; China was battling with its population crisis; pollution was at its lowest level for decades. But there was much left to do.

But a century and a half later, the progress made was astonishing. Things had changed at an exponential rate. Energy had become abundant. The Solar system had been fully colonised. The Dyson Jewels had been built. And Earth had renewed itself after all the thousands of years of human abuse and neglect.

The phoenix had risen from the ashes; Earth was reborn.

I floated on my tether. I put my visors on “Amplify”. I peered at the now unfamiliar cities in the only-too-familiar land formations of my home planet.

Was that London? I wondered. Then I recognised Big Ben.

I was home.

I stayed for a hundred years in Paradise.

Then I got bored again.

How can I write of the beauties of Earth and the Sol system? How can I praise and venerate the genius of humankind’s intellect and imagination and inventive powers?

I cannot. It is a glory beyond praise. Our oceans teem with Dolphs, our skies flock with light-boned flying humans. Our cities are wonders of delight. And the grandeur of Nature is enhanced, not diminished, by our careful tending and landscaping. The Rocky Mountains, the Himalayas, the South Pole, the savannahs of Africa, the tropical rainforests, the Highlands of Scotland, the forests of central Europe, the deserts of Africa, the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the cities of the Incas and Aztecs, the White House, the Houses of Parliament… all these treasures remain intact, restored and magnificently showcased, and are venerated.

But for me, during my stay on Earth, it came to seem strange to live somewhere where everything is beautiful, and wonderful, and perfect. This was a civilisation where there was no poverty, where education was available to all, where the average intelligence was genius level, thanks to superior training and the benefits of brain-chip implants. And it was a civilisation where no one aged, and where beauty was a prerequisite. There were no flat-chested women; there were no small-dicked men. No one died of a stroke, or a heart attack; in fact, by and large, hardly anyone died at all.

And for a long while, it all seemed marvellous. I revelled in my experiences on Earth. I savoured the company. I laughed and got drunk and travelled and helped my son plan his trading strategies.

I revisited Florence, and was able to savour the paintings in the Uffizi without having to endure long queues of babbling foreigners. I went to Venice, and found gleaming hygienic toilets in every bar and hotel. I went to Paris, and was awed by the courtesy of the waiters. I visited New York, and was beguiled by the calm, uncluttered quality of life. I toured the Midwest and drank fantastic cappuccinos, and dined in elegant gourmet ranch restaurants.

I travelled round India and did not see a single beggar. I went to St Petersburg, and discovered fabulous service and cuisine of the highest calibre. I saw no crime or pollution, no overcrowding, no bad manners. Road, rail and air travel was easy and reliable and free. The clothes were beautiful too – and richly varied, and idiosyncratic. And the racial mix was exhilarating.

In short, everything I used to hate about my own planet had been improved; and nothing, so far as quality of life was concerned, had been made worse. What’s more, I was surrounded by pleasant, witty, funny people. Having endured years of desiccated solitude on Rebus, I finally had friends and a social circle.

What could be more wonderful!

And Peter always found time to be with me. We dined together once a week. He introduced me to the best new wines. He told me amazing stories of his adventures on Meconium. I was delighted to find he had acquired a flair as a raconteur. And he was so amazingly nice to me. Eager to please me in every way, in fact. Desperate to please me, if truth be told.

He’d read every article ever written about me. He had databanks of all the memos I’d drafted. He had multiple copies of all my books, though he admitted that he had difficulty reading them. He brought me his girlfriends for my inspection. He asked my advice on his advisers, he showed me the transcripts of his Cabinet meetings. There was much he didn’t burden me with, but I became an invaluable influence on his strategy and person-management.

He loved my stories of psych bombs and mental manipulation. He was amazed at the idea that it’s possible to mould another person’s mind, purely through flattery and ego-boosting techniques.

He was such a needy child. I gave, gave, gave, but I never complained. I was only too pleased to be, at last, the mother of my son.

However, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. I found myself suffering from pleasure surfeit. I was becoming alienated by beautiful architecture and gorgeous clothes. I was fed up of constantly dealing with people with perfect manners, and perfect bodies. I was jaded with perfection.

Instead, I longed for messy, ugly, imperfect, fucked up. I wanted to be on a train that was late, I wanted a waiter to slop coffee in my lap and not apologise. I want to be jostled in the street so I could jostle back and scream, “Fuck you!” I wanted my bins to be not collected for a fortnight, so the foxes could break them open and scatter rubbish everywhere. I wanted my wine to be off so I could spit it out all over my brand-new tablecloth. I wanted my car to break down. I wanted to be constipated. I wanted an excuse to be cranky, irascible, a pain in the arse. I wanted some grit in my oyster. I was becoming, let’s face it, nostalgic for the good old days.

And so, after nearly a century of living a perfect and totally balanced and happy life, I yearned to be lonely and miserable again.

I explained all this to Peter, and he was totally baffled. And then he was upset. Almost hysterical in fact. But I persevered, and eventually he agreed to build me a stellar yacht that was fast enough to take me across the Universe, so I could travel once again.

He was, however, devastated at the thought of losing me. We had grown so close together in my years on Earth. In the course of that glorious century together, he had given me everything I could desire. Love, kindness, respect, wealth, and the best of everything. He even gave me a remote computer implant that was the twin to his own – with access to all the knowledge and wisdom of humankind, and with a flexible and evolving personality.

Yes, I can’t deny it, I savoured being a Goddess. But I had made my mind up.

Peter and I hopped on a jet and dined that night at the best hotel in Rio de Janeiro. The moon was full. The weather was balmy. The band played salsa and rumba. We talked of our pasts, our favourite lovers, our best meals. We savoured the memories we had shared over the last hundred years, in which we had finally come to know each other properly.

But then I said my farewells. Two days later I was flown into orbit, where I joined my purpose-built stellar yacht. I familiarised myself with the controls, and learned how to mould the ship to my own personality. My remote computer receiver/ transmitter chip was initialised. I realised, with some astonishment, that this was many orders of magnitude better than any microchip implant I had ever had before. With a blink of an eye I could conjure up on my retina a star atlas that would guide me through any part of the known Universe. And with a single half-voiced command, I could hear any piece of music, read any book, see any painting or work of architecture, be told any fact, savour any image that had ever existed in the history of humanity. The computer was so powerful that I was awed by its potential. But I programmed it with a personality that was meek and deferential enough to overcome my latent insecurity complex.

And finally, I unfurled the sails, fired the ion drive, and soared elegantly and swiftly out of the Sol system.

As I left, I decided on a whim to fly outside the yacht for a while. So I suited up, left through the airlock, and floated on a tether tied to the hull as I watched my home system recede. Through my ear implants, I listened to the 14th symphony of Pietro Machan. The bell resonances suffused my entire body. I felt as if I had ascended to heaven and was sitting at God’s right hand.

But there was still a dark patch in my heart. Because I knew, of course, that deep down my little boy hadn’t changed at all. I knew by then about the Doppelganger Robots and the slave planets. I knew of the policy that allowed weaker breeds to be edited out of the human race. Because in a world where some can live for ever, then from time to time others will have to be arbitrarily executed. Otherwise, there may come a day where an Earth Human actually has to wait, or even queue, for something that he or she desires.

And that will never be allowed to happen.

As well as the factory euthanasia and mass poisoning of undesirables and sicklies and uglies, it was the policy of all Earth system settlements that all newborn babies should be carefully scrutinised. And any infant which didn’t get the requisite number of ticks on his or her Future Citizen’s Examination (with categories including pre-natal health, birth weight, potential IQ, and parental DNA mix) would be terminated. Abortion was, in fact, a thing of the past; infanticide was now considered to be a much fairer method of quality control.

And as a result of this ruthlessly applied policy of population control, there was never a question of there not being enough wealth to go around. Those who are chosen to live will have all they can desire. And the only requirement of Citizenship is to work a certain number of hours a year operating a Doppelganger Robot in order to keep the wheels of human culture turning.

Some, of course, become DRs out of the sheer joy of it. Because on a perfect world, surrounded by beauty and grandeur, it’s a welcome relief to travel (virtually speaking) to a hellhole planet and confront alien monsters and rape and murder and pillage one’s own kind.

Peter called it his societal safety valve; and I do take his point. But part of me was never comfortable with the hidden implications of Peter’s form of human civilisation.

But what, I asked myself, was the alternative? A return to the bad old days of premature death, ageing, disease, poverty, starvation and injustice?

That would be absurd. This way has to be better. It has to be.

So I declined to think any further of the implications of Peter’s policies. I chose to remember the good times, and not to obsess about the murder, genocide, rape, humiliation, degradation and oppression of entire planets of human beings on hundreds, nay thousands, of planets in the human zone of habitation. Yes, bad things happen, but sometimes it’s best not to brood upon them. That was my view at that time. Perhaps I was… No.

No.

No looking back. No self-recrimination. I do not allow myself that luxury. Forward, I must always look forward.

And so I travelled through space. I saw things that are far beyond your wildest dreams. I wrote some more concerti. And, as I travelled, I had instantaneous email and vidphone contact with all my friends, from every stage of my life.

But sometimes I went years without hearing from or seeing anyone. I listened to music. I began to write, and am still writing, my memoirs. I replayed the memories I have on microchip from every year of my life since implants were invented.

I was quite content, to be honest. I sailed my yacht into the far recesses of the human-inhabited galaxy, to the region of Illyria and Kornbluth. I was aware that a mere twenty light-years away was the looming space-distorting monstrosity of Debatable Space; but I felt no fear. I sailed, and I sailed… and…

I lose myself in the long soaring arc of the plunging bucking near-light-speed stellar-wind-battered flight, my eyes drinking in the spectral glows and searing sunlight while my sensors calibrate velocity, acceleration, heat and cosmic radiation, I surf from visuals to instruments and back and both until I feel the bucking of stellar wind, no, that’s repetitious, delete the words “stellar” and “wind”, it’s now “the bucking of pulsing photons” on my fins and sail and feel the burning of the hot yellow dwarf sun on my cheeks Lena, we have company.