The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space Read online

  At lunchtime I’m looking forward to escaping for a bit. Talking to the lift is the first time I’ve spoken today, so I test it again, ‘One minus one.’ My voice is a bit croaky from lack of use, but the lift doesn’t hesitate. It’s clearly able to do maths, and so it takes me to the ground floor.

  That afternoon, there’s another email from the managers. Parliament has been waiting for the report for so long that they suspect there’s been some sort of cover-up, and they’ve summoned me to give evidence to the Outer Space Committee. I’ve never heard of this committee before, perhaps it’s made up of politicians bobbing around in spacesuits.

  When I was young, I saw ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and I fantasised about being an astronaut. After that, whenever I felt lonely at school because the other children weren’t talking to me, I’d imagine being all safe and snug inside my spacesuit and doing a walk outside my rocket, completely surrounded by space. That thin layer of the spacesuit would be the only barrier between me and infinity. But now I’m stuck because I can’t find the line that I always assumed was there. Perhaps there is no obvious barrier and it’s more of a gentle thinning out of daylight and air to darkness and vacuum. Perhaps each astronaut must learn how to travel upwards through the prosaic clutter to beautiful emptiness.

  I feel agitated by this summons to the committee, so I leave my desk and wander over to the breakout area. Even though we haven’t been in this office longer than a few weeks I’m dismayed to see that the sofas have already acquired a layer of food stains and crumbs. They look thoroughly used. And when I return to my desk a few minutes later, I can tell that someone’s disturbed it. The stack of papers has been ruffled, the array of biros is out of kilter, my coffee mug has been moved. I look around but everyone appears to be hard at work. No way of telling who has been here, disturbing my space.

  I can’t work anymore, I have to leave the office. In the lift I become calmer as I experience its slow but sure motion down through the building. I place my hand on the wall of the lift. It feels warm and it’s vibrating slightly, making me think of a sleeping body curled up next to me in my bed. I’m capable of imagining such a thing.

  The next day there is nothing on my desk. No paper or biros or in-tray, even my computer and keyboard have gone. All that’s left is a smooth, flat surface to contemplate. Perhaps the managers have moved me to another office, or perhaps it’s an extension of yesterday’s disturbance. There’s no way of telling. It’s sort of restful, in a way, to sit at an empty desk when everyone around me is working.

  But after a few minutes I get bored. I go over to the lift and I stand in the middle of it, not particularly near the grill, so that I have to speak in a loud voice and all of my colleagues can hear me, ‘Pi.’

  ‘Pi,’ the lift’s voice repeats softly.

  Pi is the beautifully endless number that can never be completely known. Perhaps it’s odd to stand in the metal cube of the lift and be reminded of pi, but there is something about the unreal voice in the lift that is better than any other voice I have had to listen to in my life.

  The doors shut. I lean against the wall and feel the lift’s tiny judder travel through my body as it tries to calculate my command. It creeps from approximation to approximation in search of mathematical perfection without once complaining. I know it will take an eternity to calculate pi. I can relax in here.

  The competition for immortality

  The fat man stayed squatting right in the middle and didn’t ever move, while all around him the skinny people were rushing around so frantically that some of them bounced off the edges of the space. Their job was to bring the fat man biscuits which he ate quickly, spilling crumbs everywhere. The skinny people pecked at these crumbs which gave them more energy and so they rushed around even faster, and brought the fat man more biscuits and he distributed more crumbs.

  In fact, the visual output of this program was actually quite crude, the skinny people weren’t much more than lines of black pixels. The fat man was just a circle with a mouth, he didn’t need limbs or eyes. The graphics weren’t important, they weren’t the essential part of the program because the real output was invisible, a database stored in the computer’s memory.

  But to make it more entertaining she’d managed to superimpose a photo of their boss’s face onto the fat man, and all the lab-people were gathered around the screen and laughing because the program was a perfect analogy of life in the department. The ‘biscuits’: the academic papers, grant applications, conference proceedings, press releases and so on all had to be fed into the boss. And in return everybody else (the lab-people, the coders and the admin assistants) just got crumbs of grant money.

  It felt odd watching her colleagues laugh at something she’d created, because she didn’t interact with them much on a daily basis. Her office in the computing section at the top of the building always seemed too far away for the lab-people to reach from their home in the basement. She wasn’t sure exactly what they all did down there, but she knew some of it involved cutting up brains with a machine that looked disturbingly like a bacon slicer.

  So as a farewell present, and partly because her grant was due to run out and she’d be leaving this place soon, she’d adapted one of her codes and added in the boss’s photo as an offering to the lab-people. And here they all were, gathered around a laptop amongst the workbenches and bottles of liquids and glass dishes and fridges and centrifuges and white coats and bits of nameless machinery. Down here she could smell a rich and complex perfume of chemicals. Sometimes this smell rose up past the entrance to the lab but it never made it beyond the first floor. The floor where she worked just smelt of old shoes.

  This was what she did for a living, she created computer simulations in which virtual animals she called ‘beasties’ could move around and eat food. If the beasties ate too much food it would run out and they would starve, so their numbers seesawed up and down as they cycled through periods of feast and famine. The latest innovation that she’d added to the beasties’ world was to give them another type of food, so they now had grass that needed to be cultivated and meat that needed to be hunted. But although there was plenty of food, the beasties’ behaviour was rather chaotic and they didn’t seem able to feed themselves very effectively. They moved in random directions, as if confused by what was on offer. She always pictured them as lumbering animals that worried about sudden loud noises or hidden predators. Even though there weren’t any noises or any predators in the code, the beasties might have a whole hidden mental existence. After all, they did in her imagination.

  And when she left this department, she was going to have to leave them behind. Even though she’d written the code that created the beasties, it was the intellectual property of the department. They weren’t really hers. As the lab-people laughed at the pixellated biscuit-eating she felt a pang of nostalgia and she wondered how the beasties would cope. There was still one more variable that she wanted to introduce to their world before she left them for good.

  The lab-man standing next to her by the laptop, who grinned at her sometimes when the boss was being excessively verbose in seminars, suggested they all go to the pub. She’d worked here nearly three years and only been invited to the pub a couple of times. So she ran to get her coat and when she found them again they were halfway down the street, with their arms linked like some long chained molecule. In the pub they shoved up to make space for her so she was able to settle down next to the man, and a few drinks later he spoke to her, ‘Do you ever compare your computer simulations to the real world?’

  ‘Other people do that.’ The beer was slipping down smoothly and the man’s hand was resting very near to hers on the sofa. She fancied she could feel the warmth of it.

  ‘Have you ever looked through a microscope?’ he asked. ‘At real things?’

  She shook her head, she didn’t do microscopes.

  ‘Come and have a look. I’ll show you a whole new world.’

  She said she’d think about it and
then she fell quiet again, she wanted to listen to some more of the lab-people’s talk because they were all so easy with each other, it made her feel comfortable too. They were talking now about the annual ‘Fruit Fly Olympics’ where different strains of fruit flies competed for the honour of being set free in the boss’s office.

  ‘Come and look tomorrow,’ the man spoke to her more quietly and more insistently than before. Then his hand came down on top of hers as if they’d both planned it, and maybe they had.

  Once, she had written a code about sexual reproduction and it didn’t have any graphics because nobody but her needed to analyse the output, and anybody else who was interested in it could use their imagination. But later that night as the man was shedding some of his cells inside her, she ran a finger around the swirls of his ears, and she examined the colours of his eyelashes. She looked at the way his fingers were splayed out on the bed, as if he were trying to grasp something just out of reach. The more she examined him, the more complexity she could find. Perhaps that’s what real life was, endless complexity and all of it beautiful.

  The next morning it was raining so hard that when he took her hand and led her into the lab, water washed down the windows and it looked like they were walking under the sea. The air felt murky and textured and ripples of light swayed across the floor and the benches as he showed her the alcove where the microscope stood. ‘This is Cyclops,’ he told her.

  ‘Cyclops?’

  ‘It’s only got one eye.’ He stood behind her as she peered down the tube and she could tell he was smiling into the moist darkness of the room. But all she could see was the enlarged reflection of her own eye looking back up at her, the lashes grossly magnified, the pupil as black as ever. She tried for some time until she had to give up.

  Later that morning she made the final planned change to the code. She introduced a genetic mutation that affected the speed of the beasties so that some of them could move quicker than others.

  When the code was up and running, she continued to work on job applications for various labs and institutes around the world. She imagined her life branching out across a map, and wondered what would change and what would stay the same if she moved somewhere else. Then the code stopped, the beasties had all died unexpectedly early. She adjusted the parameters of the mutation and started the code again, trying not to think about how many beasties had died in total since she started work here.

  The lab-man came upstairs to see her. She told him about her work and showed him some earlier outputs of the code.

  Later that night as he covered her breasts with his hands he said, ‘Beastie.’ She smiled, thinking he was trying to be funny, but he seemed unsettled by something.

  ‘You don’t know what they look like,’ she whispered. Somehow the dark made it easier to say things.

  ‘Yes I do.’ He twisted into her, ‘They look like you. You made them, didn’t you?’

  They stopped talking at that point but afterwards an idea came to her. As he lay sleeping she thought about it some more, until she’d figured out a way to do it.

  She had to break into the lab. But there wasn’t any broken glass on the floor or a figure prowling around with a stocking over her head. It was more mundane than that; all she had to do was make sure the lab-people were at the pub, then return and remember the access code for the door.

  Down here the smell felt three-dimensional, both sharp and dank. In the corner a tap dripped as incessantly as a heartbeat and hollowed-out lab coats hung on the wall. The blinds were not entirely drawn shut so that moonlight made a barcode on the floor and walls.

  But she ignored the coats and the stripes of light; she had a job to do. She’d watched the lab-people at work, so she went over to the incubators where the samples were kept, and opened one of the doors. A neat stack of flasks glinted at her. Now she set to work. She scraped her cheek with a wooden spatula, and sterilised what she’d collected so that her cells became decontaminated and pure. At this stage those cells were practically invisible and she could barely see them as she deposited them in a flask. She held the flask up to the window, imagining them growing and forming a thin film on the culture, before becoming more substantial and making their presence felt.

  She wanted to work her way through all the flasks, but there were a lot of them and her cheeks became raw very quickly, so she had to consider other possibilities.

  Together, she and the lab-man hadn’t gone this far in the lab. The previous day there had been a surreptitious fumble, a half-hearted struggle against the firm grip of waistbands and bra straps, but not this gleam of naked skin in full moonlight or this parting of her legs in plain view of the workbenches. As she claimed her own cells from inside her, she pictured the brains stored nearby. Now the lab felt like an appropriate place for bodies to meet and touch, and assert themselves against their stripped-down, disassembled counterparts in the lab fridges.

  Back in the pub she saw that the lab-man was talking to a lab-woman, his arm within touching distance of her shoulders. And she wondered why she had been so easy to forget.

  After a bit the lab-man noticed her standing there, and slid his arm away from the other woman. He even smiled. ‘Where’d you disappear to, Beastie?’ he asked and he swallowed the last of his pint, the Adam’s apple in his neck working hard.

  ‘The lab,’ she replied and he laughed. ‘I want to go back there with you,’ she told him. But he laughed again and the other woman joined in, so all she could do was pretend she’d made a joke, and wait for him to finish talking.

  That night in bed she thought of what she’d done in the moonlit lab, until the audience of lab-coats trembled in her head. Afterwards, she realised the lab-man was watching her. ‘In your own world, weren’t you?’ he said as he slid away from her.

  The code was working as she hoped; the mutation that she’d introduced made the beasties move at different speeds, the slow ones cultivated the grass and the fast ones hunted the meat. They shared food with each other so that everyone got a varied diet. The program ran and ran and generations of beasties grew and ate, and she could imagine them sitting around their fires at night telling each other stories of famous hunts in the past. They probably wove necklaces with the longer stalks of grass and made musical instruments out of old bones.

  There was a rumour. Something was happening downstairs in the lab, something unexpected was going on with the new cultures. Tests were being carried out but the lab-people were confused and her boss was worried. When she hurried past his office one morning she could hear him shouting down the phone, the cultures were behaving oddly and he wanted to know the reason why. In the sanctity of her own office she doodled, and analysed the beasties’ activities.

  Later that day she emailed the lab-man. She hadn’t seen him for a few days and so they arranged to meet after work in the carpark. Usually, as he left the lab, the lab-man was whistling but today there was just silence. She suggested that they go for a drink but he didn’t seem keen. He wanted to go back to work and figure out what was happening with the cultures.

  It was cold outside, the cars were losing their colour in the twilight, and she felt that if she stood here for much longer she would become part of this shadowy half-world. Other people were leaving the building and she watched them hurry away as if eager to abandon their earlier daytime selves.

  She tried to start another conversation but her words just dwindled into the air.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t have time for this.’ He walked away, and after a few seconds she couldn’t see him anymore. She guessed he’d disappeared back into the building.

  She stood there for a bit longer before she also went back inside, because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. In her office, yet another job offer popped into her in-box, her fourth. Around her, the possibilities of her future lives flickered but she found it difficult to believe in any of them now. They seemed more virtual than the beasties.

  Many floors below her, she knew the
lab-man would be looking down the microscope at her cells, growing and dividing. His eye staring right at her without knowing what she ever was.

  Heroes and cowards

  If this is a proper story written down in a book, then I myself most likely would not be the hero of it. I would be the narrator, the man on the outside watching the events. But whatever kind of story it is, it started that morning in the café and it came after the end of a much larger story, one which I took part in and which has been written about elsewhere. Well, most of it anyway.

  I’m sitting in the café trying to work out how long I can afford to stay in LA before having to go back east to my home town, and I’m wondering what’s happened to my life since I got demobbed. I got the suit, I got a job and then another job, but nothing’s stuck to me. At least not the things I want; money, a girl, a decent place to live. Or perhaps I just think I want them. Why don’t I give up and go home? But that feels like the wrong direction, I want to stay here in a city where so many things are still unknown to me and waiting to be found.

  It’s raining. I didn’t think it was supposed to rain in LA. But I stir my coffee and look at the rain and wonder what to do with the rest of my life. I wasn’t expecting to get this far.

  I’ve got my ‘gimme a job’ smile – I practise it each morning when I shave, but it’s not a good smile. It’s like a dog, trying to get you to like him. I know it makes people want to kick me. Hell, I want to kick me.

  Still, I feel as fresh as a peeled egg as I sit in that café checking the situations vacant column in the newspaper, so engrossed that at first I don’t notice the other man. And it’s only when he clears his throat that I look up and realise he’s waiting for me to notice him before he speaks to me. He’s polite like that. He’s always polite.