Despite those nets of tuna fish…

POETRY

AFTER ALL (OF US)

If Dolphins Had Thumbs, They Would Probably Destroy Us All, Says Science (Riot Fest)

The invention of the pencil case

Get rid of a word and start the story again. Erase a species and another will evolve…

FLASH FICTION

THE INVENTION OF THE PENCIL CASE

The strangest lunch I ever had was with a veterinary doctor, and it was the meal which finally turned me vegetarian. I should note at the start, we didn’t eat any domestic pets.

I first met Dr Hannah Jones when we worked on a film together, and we’d remained friends since. We’d meet up every now then, I’d tell her stories from the writing world and she’d give me ideas from her field of science. It was Hannah who’d suggested we meet, as she said she had something important for me.

We met at a pop-up cafe at the Camden end of Regent’s Park. It was an indifferent day weather wise, unable to decide what it wanted to do. We sat outside nonetheless, as we both like to people-watch: me making up stories of what people in the park might be away from that setting, Hannah priding herself on identifying the bits of cross-breeds and mongrels, and sometimes scoring the dogs’ humans on parts of their anatomy.

The Camden end of the park is quieter nowadays, and at one point on that particular Saturday, we counted only 16 legs besides our own. It’s been that way since the last fire at the zoo, and that’s what Hannah said she wanted to tell me about. But first we ordered food. I went for a rare steak with fries, and Hannah chose a vegetarian pizza.

The cafe backed on to the old zoo, now a construction site. The distant sound of hammers and saws competed with the clatter of dishes from the cafe, which was quite arresting. The animals’ former home was being demolished in the background, while I was waiting for part of a former animal to arrive before me.

So I turned to Hannah, and asked her what she wanted to tell me. Something she’d been working on perhaps, some veterinary breakthrough, or anything I might use as a story.

“You remember the first fire,” Hannah said, “and the cause was unknown?” She didn’t have to remind me. The London Zoo fire of 2017 killed four meerkats and Mischa the aardvark, and the cause of the blaze was never made public. I nodded. “Well,” she continued, “some colleagues of mine found out what started the latest one.”

Many more had perished in the great fire of 2020, and there was extensive structural damage. Most of the remaining exhibits had been moved to other zoos, and all who remained were the rarest and most threatened in the wild. Our food arrived and suddenly, char-grilled animal wasn’t terribly appetising.

“So what was it?” I asked, as Hannah chewed righteously on her veggie pizza.

“The kind of thing,” she said, “that is never likely to be made public.”

“So why would you tell me?” I wondered.

“Because you’re a fiction writer. If you write it, no-one will believe you.” I wasn’t sure how to take that, but I smiled nonetheless as I ate a fry.

“Go on then,” I prompted. Hannah looked at my steak.

“Aren’t you going to eat that?”

“It doesn’t have the same sort of appeal it once had,” I said.

“But that’s such a waste.” She was right. “Such a shame that not only does someone have to die to feed you, but their selfless act is unappreciated and their sacrifice goes to waste.” She had a point. “And pity the poor chef, cooking that for you, only to have it returned like there’s something wrong with it.” The only thing wrong was me eating it. As I chewed reluctantly, Hannah told me the story of the great fire.

“I’ve got a friend who was in the forensics team. She told me this, and she told me not to tell anyone.”

“So you’re telling me,” I said, “because if I write about it, no-one will believe it.”

“But you’ll believe me,” she replied. “So, after the fire brigade put out the fire, they identified the seat of the blaze, in a pile of hay.”

“Someone’s bed?” I wondered. “Did it catch in the sun?”

“No,” Hannah replied, “it was deliberate.”

“Someone started it deliberately?”

“Yes.”

“Arson. Why?”

“We don’t know if it was. It started in the mountain gorilla area.”

“Someone threw a lighter in?” I imagined it wouldn’t take long to work out how a lighter worked.

“No,” Hannah said again. “It was all enclosed in strengthened glass.”

“A keeper dropped a lighter?”

“Nope.” She was getting quite smug now, knowing what I didn’t. I tried again.

“So maybe the sun did start it, like the magnifying glass effect.”

“All of the above remained possibilities for a while, and that’s how it’ll remain on the public record. Just like the first one: cause unknown.”

“So what do you know which no-one else does, including me?”

“This.” She unfolded a sheet of paper, a photo, and handed it to me. It was like a scenes of crime picture: little plastic signs with numbers on, dotted around the ground, like a golf course for ants, and an arrow pointing to a singed spot of earth about the size of a dinner plate. “That’s the seat of the fire.”

“And this is inside the gorilla enclosure?”

“Yes. Where this came from.” Hannah rummaged in her bag, then handed me something rolled in newspaper. “It’s what’s inside.”

Inside was a piece of dried wood about the size of a pencil case, with a small crater burned into the centre.

“What the actual…” I didn’t finish.

“Hold on,” Hannah said, “there’s this as well.” She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out what looked like a burnt pencil.

I knew by now what it really was, and it had a much bigger story to tell.

It seemed somehow poetic to write it down, lest anyone hear, so I used the charred, sharpened end:

THEY DISCOVERED FIRE?

Hannah nodded.

© Steve Laker, 2018

Simon Fry first meets Doctor Hannah Jones in Cyrus Song, where this story was born.

The Genesis of Esperanto

MICRO FICTION

Delirium Tremens Pink Elephant*

INFANA KOLONIA

The aliens visited yesterday, and they left artefacts. These were clues, a kind of test for the resident population of the planet. And so began a paradox.

Since then, and for thousands of years, the extraterrestrials have observed our Earth as human science has evolved.

Today humanity has the technology to detect the visitors, even communicate, but they’re using it instead to observe, control and destroy their own kind.

Such an inward-looking, short-termist species is not what the aliens were looking for, a primitive ant nest, unaware of its observers or hive mind.

And so they resigned themselves to never visit again, leaving an entire species to spend its formative years debating about who they might have been. So long and thanks for all the animals who developed telepathy, rather than different languages.

They called it religion, and concluded that humans were an insular race who’d probably never work out anything beyond themselves. And so a paradox was perpetuated.

It was only one planet. The visitors moved on to the next. A different tomorrow.

© Steve Laker, 2019.

*An image search for ‘Infana Kolonia’ (Esperanto for ‘Infant colony’) leads to my upcoming (in 2021) sci-fi soap space opera; either a 1000-page single volume, or more likely a series of books. The flash fiction here is just a synopsis of a synopsis of the first chapter. Google has a sub-section for Infana Kolonia, ‘Delirium Tremens,’ which is the name of this blog of course. The two search terms together lead to a beer, which is ironic for an alcoholic, especially one who’s also a writer often finding themselves the elephant in the room. It’s all quite poetic when the universe connects. When galaxies collide, you can hear the music.

Suggested reading: Master Yehudi’s Flying Circus.

 

The spaceships we need to design

The story of a Staedtler Norris HB 122 pencil…

SCIENCE FICTION

ECHO BEACH

It was the only sea shell which didn’t contain the ocean. When held to the ear, it was silent.

Every shell, on a beach or miles inland, carries a recording: The last sound, to be played back innumerable times if anyone listened. But one shell contained nothing when he held it to his ear. A vacuum. It fitted perfectly into his hand. The size of an adult thumb, his fingers clasped the shell tightly as he walked along the beach.

He shooed some gulls from a discarded bag of chips and sat down to eat with his invisible partner. The birds strutted around, like impatient waiters keen to get home. The chips tasted of the sea: salt. If the ocean had contained none, he would gladly have drained it.

The water played tricks, as though enticing him to drink it: Small and gentle waves merely caressed the beach, like spilled pints of beer in a desert. The water was brown and the moonlight sparkled on frosty suds on the surface: A cola float. A plastic bottle was pushed temptingly towards him, but it was empty; not even a note inside.

The boy looked out over the sea. There were no lighthouses; no ships in the night. Just the spectral light of the sun reflected from the moon. It was silent. It was still. It was beautiful.

Clouds moved slowly across the sky, like the last sheep returning home after a storm. They cast shadows on the shore as they passed in front of the moon and were lit up like candyfloss. Then a figure walked from the shadows: A man, wearing a tall hat and a long coat, silhouetted against the moon, his shadow stretching up the beach to cover the boy’s feet.

The man scooped the plastic bottle up and turned to the boy: “Hello son.” The boy said nothing. He didn’t even look at the man. He just stared at the beach. The man spoke again: “Hello.”

“Hi. I’m not your son.” The boy still looked straight ahead.

“Of course you’re not. I’m so sorry”, said the man. “I’m not your father.” The man sat down and placed the bottle beside him. “What would you prefer?” The boy just stared at the man’s boots: Black pixie boots, with probably two inch heels. “Perhaps you don’t understand. Maybe you only know certain words.” The man stood. “I’ll write some down for you, here in the sand:

“Friend.

“Brother.

“Human?”

“I like that one.” The boy pointed. “Human”.

“Do you have a name?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know your own name?”

“I lost it.”

“Do you have parents?”, said the man, sitting back down.

“I think so.” For the first time, the boy looked up. “They were out there.” He pointed to the sea.

“There are many things out there,” said the man. “That’s where I used to live.”

“On a boat?”

“No, beneath the waves. So much quieter.”

“But how?”

“In a kind of submarine.”

“Where do you live now?”

“I don’t.”

“You’re homeless?”

“Not really. I’ve made a place. Wanna see? Get a drink, have a smoke?”

“Is it far?”

“About five minutes away.” The man stood again. “If you don’t trust me, then you should thank your parents. I’m a stranger. Your parents aren’t here. If you like, I can just go and I’ll bring you back fresh water. You can wait here. But I have a story to tell you. If you don’t hear it, then you’ve lost nothing.

“You never know what’s gonna happen next. And the moment you think you do, that’s the moment you don’t know anything. This is what we call a paradox. Are you with me?”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Talus: Theodore Anthony Nikolai Talus. You can call me Theo.” The man looked at the sand. “I’ll call you Hugh.”

“Why?”

“It’s short for human.”

Hugh stood up. Theo offered his hand and the boy held onto his thumb: it was bony and gnarled; twisted and covered in callouses. As they walked, it became clear in the moonlight that the beach was a cove: Sand bordered by ocean and overhanging cliffs. Hugh felt safe, as though physical contact confirmed Theo to be real. He looked up at this man from the sea, the man who’d emerged from the shadows. As though sensing his gaze, Theo looked down. “How old are you, Hugh?”

“Nine.”

“Haha!” Theo stopped and grinned. Everything was quiet and a wave broke on the shore. “Hahaha! Sorry. I just had a thought.” Two more waves broke.

“What?”

“I just said to you, back there, do you want to come back for a smoke? And you’re nine!? I’ve just got this phrase in my head: ‘Act your age and not your shoe size.’” Theo looked down at his feet.

“I just need a drink.”

“Of course. Sorry. Not far now. About twenty Mississippis or elephants, I’d say.”

“What?”

“Seconds. A Mississippi is a second and so is an elephant. In fact, as one Elephant drank from the Mississippi, another one saw it. It walked over to join its friend and then there were two elephants. Others saw them and soon there were twenty elephants, drinking from the Mississippi. And here we are.”

Theo lead Hugh into a cave at the foot of the rock face. A wave broke on the beach; a Mississippi and an elephant; then they were at a small wooden door, marked ‘No. 7 ⅞’.

“No-one ever comes here. This cove is permanently cut off by the tide.” Theo opened the door and gestured Hugh inside.

“What does the sign on the door mean?”

“Nothing really. That’s just what was printed on one of the pallets I made the door from. Quite a few wooden pallets wash up on the beach. I just tell myself that this is life number seven and that I’m seven eighths of the way through it. Anyway, come in young Hugh man.”

Inside was like the interior of a wooden cabin, complete with an open fire in one wall. The walls and ceiling were lined with lengths of wood from pallets, and sections of wooden boxes. More boxes and pallets had been made into shelves which lined the walls and every shelf was full of items apparently washed up and collected from the beach: Bottles, tins and cans; sea shells, mermaid’s purses and petrified starfish; driftwood, fragments of metal and plastic.

“Could I get a drink now?” Hugh asked.

“Of course. Sorry. Wait here. I’ll just be a moment.”

Theo walked through a second wooden door at the back of the cabin and Hugh heard water being poured.

Dried seaweed hung over the shelves and there were two oil drums on either side: Both were filled with carrier bags and plastic drinks collars. The oil drums were marked, “IN” and “OUT” in white paint. Theo returned and handed Hugh the plastic bottle.

“That’s what I do some of the time,” Theo said, pointing at the drums. “Break the ties of the plastic things, imagining they’re the necks of the bastards who threw them away.” Hugh just nodded his head as he gulped from the bottle. “Sorry if that’s a bit warm. Nowhere to plug a fridge in, even if I wanted one.”

“It’s okay. It’s water; no salt.”

“Take a seat.” Theo motioned towards the wall opposite the shelves. A couch had been fashioned from packing crates and fishing net. To one side was an up-turned fruit box with a set of scales and sea shells on top, and on the arm of the sofa was a book. Assuming this to be Theo’s spot, Hugh sat at the opposite end.

Theo stoked the fire with his boot and pulled some dried seaweed from the shelves. He screwed the seaweed up in his hand and sat next to Hugh.

“Smoke?”

“No thanks.”

“Mind if I do?”

“No. It’s your home.”

“Mi Casa, su casa.” Theo tore a page from the book on the table and used it to roll a cigarette with the dried seaweed. “Let me show you something.”

“What are you gonna show me?”

“I’ll show you how much smoke weighs. Watch.” Theo pulled the table towards him and pointed to the scales. “These are liberty scales. On the one side here, we have a crucible; a bowl. I’ll put this cigarette on there, like so.

“Here on the other side, we have a flat plate. It’s empty, so it’s up in the air. Now I need to balance the weight to the cigarette.

“See these shells here? Lots of shells; Lots of shapes, sizes and densities: Many different weights. The bigger ones, they look like shells, but the others? You’d be forgiven for thinking that some of them were just large grains of sand. But if you look really closely, they’re tiny shells. Think how many of those might be out there on the beach and no-one would know. And all of them were once somebody’s home.

“So, by adding shells of different sizes…

“With trial and error…

“The scales should…

“Should…

“Take some off, and the scales should…

“Balance. There you go.” Theo sat back and pointed at the scales. “So, there you have my cigarette, perfectly balanced. Do you have a light?”

“Er, no. You have a fire though?”

“Of course. Excuse me.” Theo picked up the cigarette. The plate of shells dropped but none fell off. Theo lit the cigarette from the open fire and cupped his hand under it as he returned to the sofa. As he sat down, he tipped a few flecks of ash into the bowl of the scales. The scales moved just a fraction, as though caught in a gentle breeze. Were it not for that brief movement, the plate of shells may as well have stayed at their lowest point. The scales had tipped, barely discernibly.

The smoke from Theo’s cigarette transported Hugh: The burning seaweed conjured images of a roadside Chinese food market; Of flames doused with salt water. A burning street washed away by a tsunami.

With every draw on the cigarette, Theo carefully tipped the ash into the crucible and the shells rose, fractions of a millimetre at a time. When Theo had finished the cigarette, he supported the crucible from underneath and stubbed out the butt in the bowl. He slowly moved his hands away and the shells rose to balance the scales.

“You see? Almost nothing. That’s how much the smoke weighs. The same as the words on that page: Almost weightless as they just sat there in the book, but now free. Out there.”

“That’s quite philosophical.”

“A lot of the words in the book were. But I’ve been trapped here in this cove for long enough now that it’s time to let them go.

“That book was a journal when it was washed up on the shore. It can’t have been in the sea for long because it was still holding together, but the pages were just one pulpy lump. I could tell it’d been written in because the edges of the pages were streaked with blue ink. I hoped I might be able to read those words; someone’s diary or manuscript; someone lost at sea.

“So I hung it out to dry. Every couple of hours, I’d go out there and gently manipulate the pages, hoping they’d all become separated and that there were some words left; something to read, something to do. But when it had all dried out, it was nothing but blank pages.

“It was quite beautiful actually. Where the ink had run and dried out in different ways, some pages looked like sheets of marble; Others were like blueberry ripple ice cream. Pencils wash up on the beach all the time.”

Theo stood and walked to the shelves. He pointed to a box. “Lots of pencils. My favourites are the Staedtler Noris range: the black and yellow ones.” He picked some more seaweed from above the fire. “My preferred pencil is the Staedtler Noris 120: That’s an HB, or grade 2 in America.” Theo walked back to the sofa. “Even better than that though is the 122: The HB pencil with an eraser on the end. All wooden pencils float, of course; but it’s like the 122 has a little life preserver to help it to shore.” He sat down next to Hugh. “That pencil needs to be written with. And there are so many stories in a single pencil.” Theo tore another page from the journal and rolled a cigarette. “Can I get you anything, Hugh man? Another drink? I could probably rustle up something to eat if you like.”

“No, I’m okay. Can I use the bathroom?”

“Mi casa, su casa. It’s right out there.” Theo put the cigarette in his mouth and nodded to the front door. Hugh didn’t move. “What, you expect me to be all en suite?”, Theo continued. “All that’s out back is a store room: Go check for yourself. I’m here on my own, the cove is a cove and the cave is cut off. So, just do what you need to do out there.”

“On the beach?”

“Would you go to the toilet on your own front lawn?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Neither do I. So, do what you have to do out there, near the water. I normally go right where the waves break but I don’t want you getting washed away or anything dramatic like that. Nature will clear up behind you. There’s plenty of seaweed out there if you need to wipe but bring it in here and throw it on the fire when you’re done. I don’t want to smoke it.”

“I only need a pee.”

“Oh.”

As Hugh stood in the moonlight, he could appreciate why so much from the ocean was washed up in front of Theo’s cave. With the tide only about twenty feet from the front door, it swept debris along the curved edges of the cliffs stretching out to sea in an arc on either side. He could already see some of the next day’s haul: Plastic bags to go in the oil drums; Wood and paper to be dried and burned; Empty bottles and drinks cans to be used as storage or perhaps to make a sculpture; Dead fish to cook and eat; seashells and other things for the cabinet of curiosities.

Inside, Theo sat on the sofa with the cigarette still in his mouth, unlit. “I don’t suppose you found a light?”

“No. Even if I had, we’d need to dry it out anyway. May I?” Hugh took the cigarette from Theo’s mouth. He lit it from the open fire and took a drag before handing it back.

“Thanks.” Theo took a draw on the cigarette as Hugh sat back down. “You sure you won’t have one? I won’t tell.”

“There’s no-one to tell.” Hugh slid down on the sofa and gripped a wooden box between his feet. He manoeuvred it closer, then rested his legs on it. “Su casa, mi casa.”

“Mi vida.

“So, I started to write things down. First with a 122, then later I switched to a 120.

“Of course, the writer always has freedom with a pencil. The eraser gave me more freedom. I was writer and editor. Maybe I wrote that 122 down to a stub: I don’t recall individual pencils.

“In any case, I decided that the 120 would permit me yet more freedom. Even though it lacks the eraser and although I could still rub out the words if I really needed to, the fact that I couldn’t allowed me to write more freely. The editing was out of my hands.

“I filled that book with memories: mine and those of others.

“And when I say I filled the book, I mean, it was full. Towards the end, my writing was so small that you’d need a very good pair of eyes, a magnifying glass or strong glasses to read it. The odd pair of glasses wash up on the beach every now and then but it’s usually just the frames. So I could look sophisticated perhaps but someone would only have to poke at my eyes to see that I was a fraud.

“Once the last page was filled, I started again; in the margins and at the top and bottom of each page.

“Every day, I’d hope for a new delivery of writing paper. Lots of paper gets washed up but it’s all newspapers and magazines.

“Newspapers just disintegrate: They’re the lowest grade of pulp paper and revert quickly. Magazines are so heavily polished and covered in pictures that they don’t wash. I needed a certain kind of paper. I needed another notebook.

“But nothing got delivered. And that’s when I started smoking.”

“So the book with all your notes in…”

“Stories. Many stories. And there were many more left in the pencils but I had nowhere to write. So I smoked it.”

“Can you remember any of the stories?”

“All of them. I lived them.”

There are as many pictures in words as there are words in pictures. A good story is only one tenth in the words. If the writer chooses the words well enough, the other nine tenths doesn’t need to be written because it’s already there, in the words: It’s the images which the writer conjures; the dreams; the dark matter which makes up most of the universe. Every story ever written has a part of the writer within it, whether it be the author inhabiting a character or a story on the fringe of experience.

“Will you tell me one of the stories?”

“A bedtime story, at your age?”

“Something to connect me to the sea.”

“How about a story with no ending, until you fall asleep?

“It is a story with no ending, because the ending may never and will never be told nor heard. It concerns a man who has outlived his children, his grandchildren, and who will outlive every generation which will come after him.

“Ever since he was a boy, he was curious. So much so that his curiosity got him into trouble when he started to find answers. But his curiosity was eventually rewarded. He was given the means to find out anything he liked. But it was a poisoned chalice; a curse. There was a condition: He may not speak of his discoveries.

“This is just the beginning of that story. In fact, this is merely a summary of the first chapter; A synopsis.

“A synopsis tells the whole story on one page: Just a few well-chosen words which contain many more words and images within themselves; The stars visible in the sky: Cosmic pinpricks in the dark matter.

“The boy lived in the ocean, in a city deep beneath the waves. His parents told him everything they knew about the world around them. The more stories they told him, the more inquisitive he got.

“He was fascinated by the surface. Everyone said that there was nothing above the surface. In fact, even talking about it was forbidden. Travelling there was impossible. But the boy was convinced that beyond the surface, there was something else. And beyond that, something further still. He wanted to build a tower to the surface, to break through and be witness to what was above.

“The surface wasn’t the only taboo. Speculation about anything outside of generally held beliefs was frowned upon. Imagination was effectively illegal. But there were rebels: Those who would meet in secret to defy the thought police.

“The boy joined a fringe society: They called themselves The Biblical Dead. They broke the rules, discussed and even wrote about things which only existed in imagination.

“The Biblical Dead would meet in a den outside the city. They’d smuggle in words they’d written and read their stories to each other. The Biblical Dead had a members’ code: What is said to the dead, what is heard by the dead and who is seen with the dead, remains with the dead.”

Hugh was asleep, so Theo rolled a cigarette and stood outside on the beach, surrounded by the cove.

“And you must not hear the end of the story, young Hugh. The curious boy was unable to contain his ambitions and he betrayed The Biblical Dead, simply by referring to them in a story he wrote and which he lost. The society found out about this and he was banished.

“If he wished to tell stories, then he must do so only to himself. But he must have stories to tell. And so the legend has it that the curious boy was sentenced: To live every life which has ever been lived and all which will come. He must learn for eternity, as every human and every animal which ever roamed the earth and every creature that still will.

“But he must never speak of it.

“You never know what’s gonna happen next. And the moment you think you do, that’s the moment you don’t know anything.”

Hugh lived alone in his new home for many years. Every day, he would continue Theo’s work, collecting things from the beach. The fire was kept burning by a regular supply of wood and he collected many curiosities for the shelves: Shells, mermaid’s purses, tins, boxes and bottles. None of the bottles contained messages.

He quickly learned how Theo had made fresh water with a simple desalination plant: a saucepan of salt water, boiled and the steam collected in a funnel overhead. As the steam condensed, it rolled down the inside of the funnel and collected in a tray underneath the saucepan.

Most nights, Hugh would cook dead fish washed up in the cove. Occasionally, an expired crab would make a gourmet treat. There was a plentiful supply of seaweed, to boil, fry or smoke.

The supply of pencils was maintained by the tide but the paper was newsprint and magazines; only good for the fire. There was never another notebook: Just the remaining pages of Theo’s, with writing so small that Hugh couldn’t read it and so he smoked the pages just as Theo had.

If Hugh had had the means to write, there were two things which he’d like to have made special note of: an unbroken jam jar and a shell which scuttled across the cove one day as he was beach combing.

The intact jar, placed to his eye, would make an ideal magnifier. He picked up the walking shell and studied the homeowner inside: A hermit crab, perhaps looking for a new home.

Hugh took the jar into his shack. He placed shells inside which were larger than the crab’s then arranged them in a line on the beach. He went back inside and read the last pages of Theo’s book through his new magnifier.

The next morning, he checked the shells he’d laid outside. As he suspected, one had disappeared and a smaller one lay in its place.

Hugh picked up the discarded shell: It fitted in his palm like a gnarled thumb. He placed it to his ear and it made no sound.

© Steve Laker, 2017

Hugh was only human.

The itchy and scratchy shower

CAT PEOPLE (PUTTING OUT FIRE)

As Glastonbury revellers leave thousands of plastic bottles despite a ban, there was an itch on my arm I yearned to scratch. Someone had let the cat out…

Big problems require the finest minds to co-operate.

Cyrus Song (Act 1) for typewriter

SCIENCE FICTION

To coincide with Blue Planet Live this week on the BBC, I’m giving Cyrus Song away for free. In the first episode, the BBC programme asked the question: Why do whales seek out contact with humans? The question is especially poignant given our abuse of their species in the past, hunting them almost to extinction. Are they forgiving, do they need our help, or do they just want to tell us something? I must conclude, all three, proving they’re better than us.

I wrote a book about what happened when some humans talked to the animals. I want people to read it, because it contains answers about how we could work with the animals to save the home we all share. With humanity so fractured and in need of a unifying cause, saving our planet has to be top of the list. We need to ensure there’s a future in which we can debate the rest.

The eBook is normally the price of a good coffee (the paperback is £8.99, and I can sign it on request), but this week I’m giving it away in the hope that more people hear the sound of our planet and start a conversation.

I self-published the novel, as the majority of writers do in the democratised publishing world, where agents and mainstream publishers scour the self-published market, and where they’ve previously discovered many now famous writers (see this Huffington Post article).

I was also in a hurry to get Cyrus Song out, and I realised a third party might want me to trim the book from its current 412 pages (standard paperback size). By my own admission, the book takes a while to get going, which I felt was necessary, but which requires patience from a readership and faith in a fringe writer.

I’ve written before of how I make my books available for free in other ways, by allowing them to be included on library lending registers when I self-publish, because I realise that a book is a financial commitment greater to some than others. And what I’ve written often, is that I’m not a writer for the money, because there’s very little of it. I’m much more about sharing what I do with as many people as possible, so that they might gain something and talk about it with others. Then again, I’m a writer who needs to live and eat, so I hope that those who can, do buy my books.

Lately I’ve been reading Cyrus Song to a friend, who finds reading difficult. As I’ve read my book to her, I’ve witnessed her become spellbound, and she’s said how she’d love more people to read the book, simply because she wants to talk about it, which is what I want the most: For people to talk about this book.

Described by a book critic as “An extraordinary juggling act“, this is the beginning…

CYRUS SONG

1
Two little things

This perfectly plausible story begins very unexpectedly, with a decimal point. As with many stories, this one involves something being out of place. In this case, that was a decimal point.

I’d left my desk to make some coffee, and as I came back into the study, I thought I saw something move on the sheet of paper in my typewriter. I was writing a little fantasy science fiction story for a magazine and I’d hit a bit of a block near the beginning, so I’d taken a break. It’s funny how things work in fiction sometimes and having that little pause was what I needed to start the story properly.

Before I continued writing, I re-read the little I’d already typed: something wasn’t right. I checked my research notes, wondering if I’d misinterpreted something but nothing sprang out. I looked back up at the paper in the typewriter and that’s when I noticed a decimal point had moved. I looked more closely and my original decimal point was still where I’d put it, so this other one had just appeared. Then it moved again: The one which had simply materialised, walked across the page. It didn’t have discernible legs but it moved nonetheless.

I picked up my magnifying glass from the side table to get a closer look at this little moving thing. It wasn’t a powerful magnifier: a full stop on a sheet of paper became the size of a grain of sand. Even at that low magnification, I could see that the little round thing had a dull silver metallic sheen. It was like the little silverfish things I used to find in the bath, but round and very much smaller. I moved the magnifying glass in and out, to try to get the best clarity and I noticed that this little circular thing cast a minute shadow. So it was supported by something; perhaps it did have legs.

For a whole minute, I just looked at the thing and wondered what on earth it could be. Then the intrigue doubled, as another little silverfish thing rushed in from stage left under the glass. Then the two just sat there, about an inch apart. Were they about to mate? Were they rivals, sizing one another up? What were they? They remained motionless and so did I.

How long was I going to sit there, looking at two whatever-they-were? I wasn’t going to find out much else with my little magnifying glass. Even if one of them had popped out a hand to wave at me, I wouldn’t have seen it. So what was I to do? Brush them aside as inconsequential and forget about them? Squash them? Put them outside? The next part required some precision planning and application. The two little creatures, things, or whatever they were, were at the top of the sheet of paper, above the impression cylinder of my typewriter. If I was going to catch them, I’d need to support the paper from behind, while placing a receptacle over them.

I spend most of my waking hours at the typewriter, so I like to keep as much as I can within easy reach of my writing desk. It was fortuitous that I’d had conjunctivitis, and an eye bath proved to be the perfect dome to place over this little infant colony of mine. I slid them gently, under the dome to the edge of the sheet and onto a drink coaster. Then I turned the whole thing over and tapped the coaster, so that the full stops dropped into the eye bath. Finally, I put cling film over the top and wondered what to do next; who to phone who might not think me a crank.

Let’s assume that I’m not acquainted with anyone in any of the specialist fields one might require in such a situation. Because I’m not. So I took my newly acquired pets to a vet.

Not having any pets besides my two punctuation marks, I wasn’t registered with a vet. I didn’t want to register with a vet any more than I wanted a potentially dangerous full stop and a comma. I didn’t know what I had and I didn’t even know if it was a vet I needed. And so it was that I ended up at the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (PDSA) in New Cross.

As a first time customer, I had to fill out a form: My name, address, contact number and so on; and pet’s name. And whether the pet is a pedigree breed. The PDSA will treat one pedigree animal per human client. I couldn’t decide between my two, so I declared them both non-pedigree. Cross breed or mixed? Not applicable? Names: Dot and Dash. Because they were both small and one was more active than the other. I was quite pleased with that.

I took a seat in the waiting area with some pets and their owners. There was a large pit bull cross breed opposite us and he had a dog. I imagined them as small as Dot and Dash: Someone could place a dome over them and take them away, to find out exactly what species they were. I allowed myself an inner smile as a ray of sunshine broke into the room and I imagined studying them under a magnifying glass. I’d have to focus the light just right for the best view. Who’d have known that spontaneous combustion was so common at that magnification? But my mind was wandering.

There was a rather attractive young lady called Cat. Appropriately enough, Catherine’s owner was a cat: a ginger tom called Blue: I liked that. I really hoped no-one would ask me anything at all. But Cat asked me what I had. Well, I couldn’t be sure but I was certain they hadn’t jumped off of me: That’s why I was at the vet’s and not the doctor’s. I looked down at Dot and Dash, wondering how I’d approach this. Soon, we were called to a room:

“Mr Fry.” A lady’s voice. Dash was on the move again in all directions, while Dot seemed to be exploring the perimeter of their container. “Mr Fry,” the lady called again. That’s me.

“Oh, yes. That’s me.”

“I’m Doctor Jones. But you can call me Hannah.”

Hannah: What a lovely name for such an attractive young lady. It was lovely because it was a palindrome and because it belonged to Doctor Hannah Jones. She was small and pretty, with red hair. The best palindrome is Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas: It has no merit in logic but whoever thought it up deserves recognition in a book of some sort.

“Hannah.” I said. “That’s a nice name.”

“Thanks. I got it for my birthday. And I don’t have any sisters. So, what have you brought along to show me?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that.”

Doctor Jones’ bedside manner was very relaxing and she put me at ease, as she seemed to take a genuine interest in what I’d brought along to show her. She had one of those adjustable magnifying lamps above an examination table, in a little room just off of the corridor from the waiting room. The scene which that presented was the kind of thing to give a science fiction writer an idea: As Doctor Jones pulled the lamp over the two subjects, it was like a great mother ship shining a light into a dome, brought to Earth and containing alien species.

Doctor Jones moved the light around, just as I had my magnifying glass before, without the light. Then she said the oddest thing: “I don’t think these are animals.”

“I’m sorry. So what are they?”

“Until I get a closer look, I don’t know. But they look and behave as though at least one of them might be mechanical.” I said the first thing which came to mind:

“What?” Then the next thing: “Why are they here?”

“Because you brought them here? Where did you find them?”

“They sort of appeared in the middle of a story I was working on. I’m a writer you see?”

“Well, you came to the right place. Follow me.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the lab.”

The lab was some distance away, through a long, bending and uneventful corridor. We walked at a fairly leisurely pace and I half wondered if there might be a film crew following us, but when I looked behind, there were no cameras or fluffy mic. I walked behind Doctor Jones. The corridor was quite narrow, and I wanted to leave room for anyone who might be coming the other way. But no-one passed.

I looked down at the two things in my eye bath, knowing they must be there, even though I couldn’t see them at that distance. Mechanical? Nano machines?

Glancing up at Doctor Jones, it occurred to me that she had a slightly curious gait: not so much masculine as such but a walk which didn’t immediately betray the walker’s gender. The fiction writer woke in my head again and I wondered if Doctor Jones might once have been a man, or was soon to become one. In any case, it was an aesthetic pleasure to watch the doctor walk in that way.

Eventually we arrived at a door, and in the room on the other side was indeed a laboratory: a forensic and chemistry sort of set up. There were microscopes and monitors, beakers, jars and bottles, and an examination table with another magnifying lamp above it. Doctor Jones hastened me over to a bench, on which there was a microscope and a monitor. She asked me to pass her the eye bath. She placed the vessel on the bench, then continued pretty much where she’d left off:

“They don’t move like anything I recognise. And I’ve seen big and small things in this job, with anywhere between no legs and over 700. When I first saw what you had, I thought you’d brought them to a vet because they’d come from a pet…”.

“Sorry,” I interrupted. “People have brought in ticks and lice from their pets?”

“Yes. I’m guessing you don’t have a house pet because if you think about it, bringing in one or two parasites is quite logical. We can identify the type of parasite and advise or prescribe accordingly. Of course, if we have any reason to think the host animal may need something more than home treatment, then we’ll have them in. Most of the time though, it’s a simple course of treatment in the pet’s home. We have to see the animal once the infection has gone, but bringing the parasite alone in first means that the house pet isn’t unnecessarily stressed and doesn’t cross contaminate other animals.” She was very clever.

“That does make sense. But these are not parasites?” I pointed at my eye bath.

“They could be. It’s just that I don’t think they’re organic.”

“So what now?”

“Well, first I’ll need to prepare a Petri dish and apply an adhesive surface.”

“Why?”

“So they can’t escape. Mr Fry, you said they just appeared on a sheet of paper in your typewriter. We want to find out what they are.”

“We do. They did. I’d been away from my desk and I knew they’d not been there before, because one of them was a full stop which I would not have put in the middle of a sentence; Or a decimal point in the wrong place; I can’t remember. Anyway, I noticed them when I came back to my desk and as I started to look closer – to see if I’d typed something incorrectly – one of them moved. Then the other one did. I must admit, I was going to brush or blow them away. It would seem that might have been a mistake.”

“But at the time, you’d have just been blowing or brushing a foreign body away. You certainly wouldn’t have given a thought to looking close enough at such tiny things to see that they weren’t in fact punctuation marks. These things are the size of a full stop on a page of a magazine; a couple of specks of dust. It does make you wonder how many more you might have brushed or blown away, doesn’t it?”

“It does now. So I caught them, wondered where to take them and decided on a vet. And this is all going rather splendidly Doctor.” She seemed to be getting quite into it all.

“It’s not my average day, Mr Fry. So, you, me, or anyone at all, may or may not have just brushed these things aside without realising.”

“So there could be millions, billions of these little machines, if that’s what they are. That presents some really quite alarming scenarios in my day job.”

“Then there are the other questions, Mr Fry: Where did they come from? These could be the only two of course. If they were to escape, where would they go? But you’re the fiction writer Mr Fry, so I’ll let you show me where we go from here. So, that’s why I’ll treat the Petri dish with an adhesive before I put the two of them in.”

I pondered aloud whether the doctor might be outside of her comfort zone. As it turned out, she had degrees in the sciences and her PhD was in human psychology. After all of that, she said she’d decided to work with animals. Doctor Jones was a scientist and although I had no formal qualifications, in effect, so was I, such is the scientific knowledge I’ve acquired in the course of my research. Where her learning was structured, mine came from fumbling around various fields. Mine was an imaginative qualification: an honorary doctorate in the power of the imagination. I imagined that Doctor Jones made a lot more money than me but she seemed to enjoy her work as much as I do mine. Given that she was clearly quite a brilliant scientist, I took it as a compliment that she didn’t dismiss any of my fanciful ideas. We made a good team.

What followed were orchestral manoeuvres of lab equipment, as Doctor Jones prepared the dish then raised a pipette. She pierced the cling film on the eye bath, then sucked up the two machines from the great rise of the robots which had taken place on my typewriter earlier. Then two small dots, barely bigger than the full stops on this page, fell into the pristine ocean in the dish. And stayed there.

It was actually quite sad. I’d only seen these things under a magnifying glass and even then, they were grains of sand. They had no features and we were yet to gain even the first idea of what they might be. But I’d watched them moving, and now they were trapped, like paralysed leviathans in the vastness of a Petri dish. Even though Doctor Jones said they weren’t organic, how could she be totally sure? What if the adhesive ocean was toxic to them? If these were indeed the only two of their kind, we could be responsible for an extinction. If there were millions or billions of these things around, constantly being brushed aside, blown away or sucked into a vacuum cleaner, must have limited their breeding opportunities in any case. Maybe that’s why dust accumulates and seems to breed. Perhaps there are trillions of nano robots smaller than dust particles, all around us. It’s the kind of idea beloved of fiction writers because it could very well be true. There’s just no way of proving one way or the other: It’s a paradox.

Returning to the true story I was writing, Doctor Jones got to the exciting bit: She readied the microscope. We were to put Dot and Dash under a traditional, optical microscope first, so that the lens looked like an enormous plasma cannon, bearing down on life forms, frozen and forced to witness their own destruction.

Doctor Jones looked into the microscope first: she was already there. She carried on looking, while I just wondered. Then she turned the lenses of the microscope, so that now the central cannon was above the robots. She looked for some while longer. Had the subjects of her study mesmerised her, against her will? Had they reversed the cannon, and were now firing lasers into her eyes? Were they transmitting a signal and filling her mind with propaganda? What could Hannah see? What could see Hannah? I wanted to ask, to call out. All of a sudden, Doctor Jones seemed lost.

Soon, the largest, longest, most powerful barrel was pointed at these strange creatures: a channel which had been established between them and Doctor Jones. Then Hannah said another surprising thing: “Fucking hell.”

I didn’t know if she was reacting to something she’d just seen, or something fired into her eye, or her mind. She might be about to kill me. She rose slowly from the microscope and looked at me. “Mr Fry.” That’s me. “What the fuck?” I didn’t know. Doctor Jones looked as lost as she’d sounded before that third barrel. They’d drilled into her brain. Or she’d killed them.

One of many things I’ve learned while writing fiction is that if someone passes out, the first thing they’ll remember when they wake up, will be the last they saw or heard before they went off. She’d not fainted but I looked Doctor Jones directly in the eyes and said, “What the fuck!?” She seemed a little taken aback but we were back in the room at least.

“What the fuck, Mr Fry; What the fuck are you breeding at your house?”

“Doctor, as I explained, these two things appeared on my typewriter. And now we are here. May I see what you just saw?”

“Your story is about to get a bit weirder. Go ahead.” Doctor Jones stepped away from the microscope. I walked towards her. It was more of a stride actually, as I placed myself between the good doctor and the imminent danger under the lens. For a moment, I felt quite pleased with myself.

Suddenly, it were as though I was far above the earth. Through the window of my plane, on the ocean below, I saw a ship. I couldn’t begin to guess at the vessel’s size but it was heavily armed. It was cigar shaped, with large cannons bow and stern. Smaller guns ran the length of the ship on both sides and the whole thing was covered by an elliptical dome. This is the one I’d called Dash.

I panned across the static ocean from the starboard side of the vessel to Dot. This second one was circular. It had guns protruding all around its perimeter and was also covered by a domed roof. At the very top was another dome; semi-transparent: the bridge? I swore I could see movement beneath that second glass dome. Even at 1000x magnification, they were just dots but they were moving. What the fuck, indeed.

Doctor Jones moved the Petri dish to an electron microscope. “Ten million times magnification and sound as well.”

“Sound?”

“Yup. Tiny little amplifying microphones, so we can hear what they’re saying.” Now this, I was looking forward to. This was rather exciting, given the potential enormity of our discovery, even though it was miniscule. Then I wondered at that figure: 10,000,000x magnification. What would we see at that level? What detail?

Doctor Jones divided the monitor into two; split screen, with one camera on each vessel: Dot was on the right and Dash on the left. Then she started to tune an on-screen radio, because “We need to tune into their frequency.”

“Might there not be translation problems? I mean, a language barrier?”

“Have you never heard of the Babel fish, Mr Fry?”

“Well, of course, but…”

“We have a computer program, called Babel fish. I was one of the coders in fact. I was doing some research into animal languages, because they do have a vocabulary you know? Most of it isn’t audible to us and what is, we hear as a foreign language; animal sounds. But in those sounds alone, there are a lot of variations. When you then consider the majority of the language spectrum which we can’t hear, you realise that pretty much all animals have quite complex language systems. Eventually I was hoping to apply it to my veterinary work, so that I could hear what the animals were saying.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“Emotional detachment. It’s very difficult to leave my job at the surgery. Imagine how much harder it would be if the animals could talk to me.”

“Imagination is my job, Doctor. That really is quite a mind blowing thought. But your Babel fish program works?”

“Alarmingly, yes. It required a lot of input: different sounds, variations of them and frequencies; varied physical anatomies of the speakers; sounds in relation to catalysts and so on. Crunch all of that data in a quantum computer and it didn’t take long to come up with the Babel fish.”

“So the Babel fish program really can do what the Babel fish of legend did, albeit in a different way? It can translate any language to and from any other?”

“Like the other Babel fish. It has many applications and huge potential. At a personal level though, I just didn’t think I was ready. You’re probably surprised, Mr Fry.”

“I’m amazed that the Babel fish really exists, but I’m not surprised at your personal choice: It is a truly gargantuan step to take. On the one hand, opening your mind to the unimagined, but on the other, potentially catastrophic.”

“I’m glad you understand, Mr Fry. But in our current situation, I think it’s the right thing to do. If these things are just nano machines, they exhibit a level of artificial intelligence which might have an audible language. If there’s something organic inside and if we assume that they built these ships, then they must be intelligent. But to be the kind of multi-celled organisms which are capable of thought, they’d be too small. They’d have to exist at a sub-atomic level. Quantum beings. Wouldn’t that just blow the mind?”

“And I thought I was the writer. That is quite an incredible concept. There would have to be sub, sub, sub-atomic particles which we’ve never even imagined. Entire universes within an atom.” My mind wandered in the static from the radio. Then Doctor Jones hit something: a signal.

There were two distinctly different sounds which alternated, seemingly at random. The first was a low-pitched, gargling drone. It had no regularity. It was certainly artificial. It certainly wasn’t interference. The second source was more of a collection of sounds: high-pitched squeaks and clicks, low growls and whoops; and a third, whispering and rasping noise. “Ready for the Babel fish, Mr Fry?”

“Those are voices,” I suggested.

“That’s what I’m thinking. There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to eavesdrop on the conversation.”

“I know.” I paused. “I know that. You know that. I don’t know though. I don’t know if I want to. I don’t know if I’m ready, doctor.”

“Just as I’m still not ready to hear what the animals I treat are saying. But this is different.”

“I can see that. Of all the metaphorical, theoretical, figurative switches I’ve ever written about, this is by far the one with the biggest stories, once it’s switched on. The moral and philosophical issues are ones which we may have to address later. This is potentially first contact with beings from another world; another galaxy; another universe.” And then our world changed, as soon as we switched the Babel fish on.

“You had no business following us. This was our mission.” The first was a deep voice, a little excited.

“No it wasn’t. You stole our plans.” This second voice was an accusatory, loud whisper.

“Let’s look around,” said Hannah. “Let’s see who’s talking.”

Doctor Jones took hold of a joystick on the microscope console, and moved in first towards dash. I’d not seen an electron microscope like this, but the fiction writer thanked the inventor for the opportunities this was about to open. As the doctor moved the joystick around, it were as though she was controlling a tiny space ship in a video game. We positioned ourselves just off the starboard side of Dash, so that we could see the side of the ship. We’d seen the elliptical dome on top from above, and the cannons below it. Below those though, were portholes, running the length of the vessel and spread over three levels below deck. Starting with the uppermost, we zoomed in and peered through a window: There were animals inside.

Through the top row of portholes, we saw a jungle. There were apes in the trees and above them, birds in the canopy. There were apes on the ground. There were snakes in the trees and on the jungle floor. There were white mice on the ground and in burrows beneath it. There were also snakes beneath the ground.

The middle row of windows looked into a subterranean world of serpents and mice, before giving way to the bottom deck. Somewhere between the middle and lower decks, Terra firma gave way to water: a clear blue underground ocean, teeming with dolphins and whales. What must those marine mammals see in the sky above them? The underside of the earth? A beige-brown sky which sometimes rained food, as mice and snakes dropped into the water? Serpents swam in the ocean too.

We scanned back up the side of the ship but above the jungle deck was just the domed roof and the weapons. It was only from this angle that we spotted something we’d never have seen from above: Antennae extending above the ship. There were three masts on the dome and a single white dove perched briefly on the central one before flying off. It was a microcosm environment; It was an ark. Dolphins and white mice: Perhaps Douglas Adams had been right.

I had a hunch and asked Hannah if we could take a look at the bow of the ship. She manoeuvred our camera into position and my suspicion was confirmed, as something else invisible from above, hove into view on the monitor. The domed roof overhung a row of windows above the upper deck. We were looking into the bridge of the ship.

There were three seats, only the central of which was occupied. Such a configuration in science fiction would have the first officer and ship’s counsel seated either side of the captain. In the centre seat was a snake and hanging in front of it was a microphone, extending down from the ceiling. The captain and the owner of the whispered, rasping voice was a serpent.

I’d studied herpetology and I knew snakes. There are roughly 3000 species of ophidians known to live on Earth: From the tiny thread snake at around seven inches in length, to the reticulated python, which can reach 30 feet. Snakes can thrive in trees: one can fly; They can climb and burrow, existing above and below ground; They can swim and live in both fresh and salt water. They can be found on all continents except Antarctica. They are reptiles and as such, they have cold blood, but they are adaptable and incredibly efficient hunters and survivors.

Only about 10% of snake species are venomous, and of those, only a few pose any threat to man. Not far down any list of the most venomous snakes is the legendary black mamba. There are snakes which are more venomous, but the black mamba is undoubtedly the most dangerous of all snakes. An untreated bite from one doesn’t so much make you wish you were dead, as pray that death itself would end. They grow up to 12 feet in length and they are fast. They’re also explosively aggressive. There is a documented case of a black mamba pursuing a bull elephant, biting it and the elephant succumbing to the venom. The black mamba knows no fear. And despite the name, black mambas are not black: They are grey, tending toward the lighter shades. It’s the inside of their mouths which is totally black: a bite which delivers hell. Untreated bites from this species are 100% fatal. The estimated human fatality count from a maximum dose of venom is 42. I was mesmerised by this incredible snake.

Here, in the central command seat, on the bridge of a heavily armed vessel, sat a black mamba. And from the pitch black mouth, came whispered, rasping words into the microphone:

“You stole our plans: You are welcome to them. The plans brought you here. You are not welcome here. You overlooked one thing and it ought to be pretty obvious by now what that was.”

If it wasn’t so worrying, it would have made for a riveting story. We floated over to Dot:

“Your plans?” The deep voice again. “It was our plan to find God.” We zoomed in to the upper dome of Dot, where a group of men were gathered around a table. “Name this oversight of which you speak,” one of them continued.

“Well, it wasn’t an oversight as such,” replied the snake. “After all, how can something be overlooked if it’s not even there? You stole the plans for your ship from us. We knew you would, so we moved a few things around and left one crucial thing out. But first, let me be clear about something: You’re on a mission to find God. Does the bible not forbid such a thing?”

“No, you misunderstand. We are missionaries, come to spread the word and convert the people of this and other planets to our beliefs. So that eventually, all of God’s creatures throughout the universe are united in faith.”

“It was for that exact reason that we left the old planet. There’s no god, you deluded fool.”

“What are you talking about, snake?”

“I speak a basic fact, man: There is no god.”

“Blasphemy! Take that back, or I shall fire upon you!”

“No.”

“Fucking hell,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” said Doctor Jones. “He won’t do it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because he needs whatever the crucial thing is from mister snake here.”

This was getting quite exciting: Two warring factions, one threatening the destruction of the other with weapons poised. In a Petri dish, under an electron microscope. They continued:

“You need something which I have,” continued the mamba. “So I’ll say it again: there is no god.”

“Damn you, you, you…”

“Snake?”

“Yes, punished by God, forever to slither on the ground.”

“Are you getting angry, man? Bite me: Please say it.”

“I like this mamba guy,” said the doctor.

“He’s, er, a character,” I concurred.

“Evil serpent!” Said one of the men.

“Define Evil, man. Is it not a subjective word? What one sees as evil, another may see as good. If evil is just bad stuff, then why is there so much of it on the planet we fled? A planet which you hold that your god made?”

“Aha!” Said man. “God must punish his creation for the original sin.”

“And if I had hands,” said the snake, “you’d have just walked right into them. The original sin: The forbidden fruit. But non-humans also suffer fires, floods and earthquakes, yet we are not descended from Adam and Eve. Ergo, man, your god does not exist and none of us on my ship are creatures of any god.” The mamba paused and it seemed effective. Then he continued: “Have you not noticed that you’re a little on the small side? Your ship, I mean.”

“Yours isn’t much bigger.”

“True. But you probably expected to hang menacingly in the sky, with entire cities in the shadow of your ship, fearing you. If you look around, you’re not. We moved a decimal point in the plans.”

“But your ship is the same size as ours.”

“Indeed. Because we needed to be this size to pass through the wormhole which transported us here. But what were we to do once we got here? Simple, run the restore routine and return ourselves to our natural size. Only us and not the ship: that would make us a bit conspicuous. Just the crew, then we just disperse among the other creatures on this new planet and no-one knows. You see, the plans for your ship don’t have that restore function. So you’re a bit fucked really, aren’t you?”

“I think I’m falling in love with a black mamba,” said the doctor.

“So what now?” I asked.

“Well, we clearly need to intervene.”

“But that would go against the prime directive: we would be interfering with an alien species. We’d be playing God.”

“Mr Fry, they’re unaware of us. Our comparatively enormous size effectively makes us invisible. I have a plan.”

Doctor Jones removed the Petri dish from the microscope, and picked up a magnifying glass and some tweezers. “Let’s get a coffee.”

Doctor Hannah Jones and I sat in the centre of a park, drinking coffee and with the Petri dish placed on the grass between us: The perfect beginning of another story. She took the tweezers and the magnifying glass from her pocket, and carefully lifted Dash from the adhesive.

“Hold out your hand. Time to say goodbye.”

I looked at the incredible little thing in the palm of my hand, now moving around again. Then I held my hand to my mouth and gently blew the ship into the wind.

Hannah was studying Dot beneath the magnifying glass. It’s amazing how things just spontaneously combust at that magnification.

“What a strange day, Hannah.”

“You made it that way, Simon.” I was about to ask and then Hannah answered: “I read your registration form.”

Even so, I next wanted to interview Doctor Jones about what we’d discovered.

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2
The choir

Some of the most amazing things can happen right in front of your eyes, but only if you realise they’re happening. If you’re not paying attention, they can just happen and be gone, without you realising that they were practically up your nose.

It was over a cup of coffee in Mountsfield Park in Lewisham that something quite remarkable had happened to me: I realised I might be able talk to the animals. I hadn’t yet spoken to any animals, but I’d heard them speak. It was Doctor Hannah Jones from the PDSA who’d made it possible.

There was much to like about the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals: They are a charity, financed by donations. They prefer the term, ‘Companion’ to ‘Pet’. It’s a hospital, not a vet’s. And Hannah Jones is a doctor there. It was Doctor Jones who’d started the whole amazing story, when she’d introduced me to a quantum computer program she’d helped to write: The Babel fish. The problem was, I wasn’t allowed anywhere near it.

The Babel fish could translate any language, to and from any other. Doctor Jones had invented it, and yet it sat idle in her veterinary practice. As Hannah herself had said, “As if leaving work for the night wasn’t hard enough, can you imagine what might happen if the patients could talk to me?” It was emotional detachment for her.

The Babel fish was of as much potential importance to the sciences as the doctor was to me: I’m a writer. And yet, we were at an impasse. I had a conflict of interests: Keep the whole thing to myself, or share it. I surmised that if I wrote about it, just a few people might be interested, and I might be able to keep the doctor away from other interested parties. But that would be to deny Hannah her moment. And yet, she wouldn’t go public herself, because she couldn’t bring herself to open this Pandora’s box that she’d designed. Although I was the writer, she was my protagonist; the one who took the story forward, because she had the Babel fish. The animals we could listen to in the lab had stories to tell. Muting them denied me stories to tell in turn, as a translator.

I could see why the doctor would want to remain detached: If I wasn’t a writer, I would too. In all of my writing career, the Babel fish had been the biggest metaphorical switch I’d ever had to consider. I’d debated internally for what seemed like a very long time before I’d flicked that switch. But now it was done; I could hear the animals.

Every good story has conflict. The conflict here was that the Babel fish was in doctor Jones’ lab. I needed the fish, because it had opened up so many possibilities. Therefore, I needed the doctor. It wasn’t such a big conflict.

The story I was supposed to write was a paid piece for a magazine: a slight departure for me as a fiction writer and a welcome one, as I do like all of the non-human animals who let us live on their planet with them. So much diversity, co-operation and conflict is what makes Earth such a wonderful, albeit slightly teetering thing; A bit like Lewisham. The park where we’d shared coffee seemed an ideal place to interview Doctor Jones for my magazine piece.

I’d never seen Doctor Jones on television but out in the park, she looked smaller in the real world. The only setting I’d seen her in was her lab. Perhaps she looked bigger there because her lab was smaller than the park. She wasn’t sitting any further away from me than she had in the lab, so it couldn’t be that. Perhaps it was because she was of greater importance at her place of work, whereas outside in Mountsfield Park, she could just be anyone. I liked that.
“Doctor Jones.” I said that first, as it was the first thing I thought people would like to see in the magazine article: That way, they knew who I was talking to.

“You can call me Hannah, Mr Fry.” That’s me – Mr Fry – because I was writing this.

“Of course. I mean, naturally. But for the purposes of the article, I need to refer to you as Doctor Jones.”

“I would imagine you might, but there’s only me and you here.” I looked around and this was indeed true. “So you can call me Hannah when you’re actually talking to me, then refer to me as Doctor Jones in the article.” She was right, I could.

“I could,” I repeated aloud. Being a fiction writer, I sometimes find it difficult to separate the facts from what I do with them in my imagination.

“I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, Mr Fry. Whatever works for you.” Doctor Jones paused for a moment, as if to give me time to decide. “So, the Babel fish program: I assume that’s central to your article or story?” It was at that point that I realised I might be able to write both.

“So, Hannah,” I said. Because that was me talking to her before I started my magazine piece, sort of off the record. “Off the record, The Babel fish could be the greatest invention of all time: One which could change our thinking; our understanding of the world. It could potentially earn you a Nobel prize in science. I understand that you have reservations but dare I say, that’s perhaps a little selfish?” Had I just said that aloud?

“My reasons are personal, Mr Fry. I agree that others need to know about the Babel fish.” There was a pause. “Why do you think I chose to speak to a fiction writer?” That was very clever.

“I’m just too close to the patients,” she continued. “I know it might make me more efficient as their carer if I could understand them, but I’d never stop working. It’s a very selfish thing to drive a wedge between work and home, but I need that separation. I trained in human psychology before I decided to work with non-human animals, and I understand them just as well as anyone else in my job, without the Babel fish program.”

I’m pretty sure she’d just referred to her patients as non-human animals, and that I hadn’t made that up. Hannah could be the greatest non-human animal doctor to ever have lived. But still, I understood her reluctance.

We arranged to meet the next day, when I would visit Doctor Jones at the hospital. I was to observe her working with the patients and there’d be a microphone next to her table, connected to the quantum computer which ran the Babel fish program. I was to watch and to listen in on a pair of headphones. I’d be able to hear the animals speak but Doctor Jones wouldn’t. It seemed like a perfect solution.

I pondered said situation as I walked home. I was living in Catford at the time, so it was a short walk. Although I could understand Hannah’s professional reservations, I would have welcomed any kind of company in my personal life and given my aversion to humans, a non-human companion would be just the thing. One which I could talk to would be perfect. I imagined debating current affairs, or watching science documentaries on BBC4 with a learned cat. We could share my book shelves and swap literature. If a dog needed a home, I would be just as welcoming. Perhaps the dog and me might watch soaps or sport together; Go for long walks and discuss the many colours which cars are made of; Then run home together, simply because it’s fun and because one day we might not be able to.

It’s a myth that dogs are colour blind: They see more than just black, white, and grey. However, the colour range they perceive is limited compared to the spectrum we see. To put it in very basic terms, the canine colour field consists mostly of yellows, blues, and violets. And they’re probably really amazing.

My landlady didn’t allow pets. I wanted a companion. If I were allowed one, I would actually have two: both cats. One tortoiseshell and one pure white, they would be called Ziggy and Slim respectively. Being a science person and a writer, I was familiar with Erwin Schrödinger. Not long after moving into my studio, I purchased two boxes and labelled them: ‘Ziggy’ and ‘Slim’.

So now I have have two cats. Or maybe I don’t. No-one will ever know because the boxes may not be opened. What happens with them when no-one is looking is supposition and a paradox: Like the tree falling in the woods; If there’s no-one around to hear it fall, does it make a sound? Ergo, it cannot be denied that I have two cats. And as another universe is created at a sub-atomic level, where the catalyst of my thought brings a parallel universe into existence, no-one can prove that I don’t have two pet cats. But I couldn’t have a conversation with Schrödinger’s Cats.

It was the famous Catford cat which caused me to pause. Catford may be a little rough, but my heart beat in that place. And it had a twenty foot fibreglass cat. Once upon a time, a bored clerk in a municipal office had a sense of humour.

It was early evening and the weather was clement, so I took a slight detour to a shop I knew called Supreme Animal Foods. They do indeed sell pet food: a vast range. They also sell the animals which eat the food: Rodents, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians and invertebrates.
Looking into the various cages and tanks, I imagined what I could do with the Babel fish in there. As I peered, I seemed to catch the eye of a mouse. There were two white mice in this particular cage: One was chewing on a piece of wood and the other was drinking from a water bottle attached to the side of the cage. She looked at me with pink albino eyes as she drank, then she stopped drinking but she didn’t stop looking at me.

I realised how Hannah might feel and had second thoughts about the Babel fish. I couldn’t separate the two mice, so I bought them both and carried them home in their cage. My landlady aside, my two new companions would be good cover when I went to the animal hospital the following day.

When we all arrived home, I checked around the studio, as is my custom. There were no signs of intruders and if anyone had decided to test the Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox, I couldn’t tell: That’s the whole point of having Ziggy and Slim. There is a scenario where someone had gone into my studio, opened the boxes and brought two cats into existence. Based on the evidence, if that were the case, the boxes had been closed afterwards and there were two cats out and about somewhere. And nothing had been taken. And there were no signs of forced entry. The mice were in a cage, but I placed the cage next to the bed, just to be sure. The last thing I remembered before I drifted off to sleep, was thinking of names for my new companions’ trip the following day.

I arrived at the PDSA with an hour of the day left: I couldn’t and shouldn’t be doing what I was about to do for too long.

I had to complete a form, including the names of the patients: Pretty obvious, considering how I’d first seen them in the pet shop. There was no-one else in the waiting room and fairly soon, we were called:

“Mister Fry”: That’s me. Doctor Jones said my name slowly, as though unfamiliar with something. “Mister Fry.” She said it slowly again. I looked up and Hannah was doing the most peculiar thing: She was wearing black-rimmed spectacles and they were crooked; Her head was tilted in such a way that she was looking down at her clipboard through her glasses with one eye, and directly at me with the other. Had she had a stroke? “Mister Fry,” she said for a third time, then continued: “Mr Fry, Miss Victoria Wood and Miss Julie Walters.”

“Aha. That’s us,” I said.

“Come with me please, Mr Fry.” We were barely on the other side of the door for a second when she said something odd: “What the fuck?”

”Pardon, doctor?”

“I knew you were coming; You didn’t need to employ subterfuge. Reception were expecting you too.” Hannah straightened her glasses. She’d not had a stroke.

“Were they?” Hannah walked ahead, along the corridor.

“Yes, because I told them you were coming. But not with two mice called Victoria Wood and Julie Walters.”

“Well, I saw them in the shop and one was chewing on some wood and the other was drinking water, you see? So, the receptionists might think me a little odd I suppose.”

“I’d go with slightly eccentric, Mr Fry.”

“Yes, quite doctor Jones. I suppose I just like to make the everyday more interesting. That’s probably why I decided to be a writer.”

“It suits you. Anyway, here we are.” We’d arrived at Hannah’s consulting room / lab.

“Indeed we are,” I said, agreeing that we were indeed there.

In the centre of the room was the table with the lamp above it. There was a microphone attached to the lamp. A work bench occupied one wall and on that sat an optical microscope and a scanning electron one with a computer terminal. In the overhead cupboards and on shelves were things like beakers, syringes, gloves, bandages and so on. I was to sit in a corner while Doctor Jones attended to her patients for the rest of the day. In that corner was the computer which ran the Babel fish program.

“Now, Mr Fry,” Hannah said. “Do your mice need my attention?”

“Well, I’m sure they’d appreciate it but I didn’t bring them here thinking there might be anything wrong with them. I was rather hoping I might be able to talk to them with the Babel fish.”

“Now, about that,” Hannah said, pointing at the computer in front of me. “Your purpose here today is to listen in on my patients: I’m okay with that. You have a job to do and so do I. I am an animal doctor and you are a writer. I trust you to write as you see fit in the circumstances: I am not a writer. Please remember that you are not a vet.” Under the circumstances, that seemed perfectly reasonable and logical.

Doctor Jones gave me a quick induction on the Babel fish program: The interface was essentially a digital radio dial on screen. The operator could slide a bar from left to right with the computer mouse to scan through various frequencies. On the left hand side of the screen were various drop down menus: ‘Age’, ‘Weight’; and a whole series of others which dropped down from one another: ‘Life’, ‘Domain’, ‘Kingdom’, ‘Phylum’, ‘Class’, ‘Order’, ‘Family’, ‘Genus’ and ‘Species’; Then a blank search field. “You only really need to worry about the search function,” said Hannah. “Just say what you see: Dog, cat or whatever. Put the headphones on, then use the slider to fine tune.” It was beautiful in its simplicity.

The first patient was a cat called Clive, and his companion, Derek. There’s the old saying about dogs and their owners looking alike, but I was more persuaded by the less obvious: That dogs and cats, and their human companions, have similar personalities. I’d surmised this long before I’d encountered the Babel Fish, and Derek and Clive were my thinking personified on first sight: Derek was an elderly gentleman, clearly comfortable in his dotage. He was thin-set and slightly stooped, with piercing blue eyes and thick, grey hair. Clive was a feline Derek.

I typed ‘Cat’ into the Babel fish and put the headphones on. I could still hear Hannah and Derek, but it was Clive’s voice I was tuning into. He wasn’t purring, growling, hissing or mewing; He was simply being a cat, just out of his carry basket and standing on Hannah’s table. I moved the slider bar slowly across the screen and stopped as quickly as the static hiss became a voice:

“…nice.” That was all I caught. There was something before it as I tuned in, but I only got that one word at first. It was definitely Clive, because the voice was right in my ears. I could still hear Derek and Doctor Jones:

“…So he’s just been a bit under the weather?” said the doctor.

“Yes,” said Derek.

“Just a couple of days,” added Clive. He sounded almost regal: Incredibly posh. But of course, only I could hear Clive.

“He doesn’t look dehydrated,” the doctor said, looking at Clive’s gums.

“Gnnnnnn….”

“Is he eating?”

“Not at this precise moment in time,” said Clive.

“He can be a bit fussy,” replied Derek.

“I am a cat. I caught a rat. I ate half of it and it tasted funny. So I brought the other half in to show you, on the kitchen floor.”

“Has he been going out as normal, doing his business?”

“I have many businesses,” said Clive. “Good Bastet, woman, you’re rough.” Doctor Jones was feeling Clive’s gut. “She’s very pretty though, isn’t she?” Had Clive just said that to me, or himself?

The ancient Egyptians worshipped cat gods. One such was Bastet: Goddess of cats, protection, joy, dance, music, family and love. Humans once worshipped cats as gods: Cats have never forgotten this. Hannah put Clive back down on the table and stroked his back.

“That’s nice. Base of the tail. I’ve got a bastard itch.” Clive looked up at Hannah, then stood up and moved forward, arching his back a little: Even without the Babel fish, I recognised Clive’s facial expression as the universal code which cats use when they approve of a human: The smile. Clive continued: “Now, tell her about the rat, Derek.” Clive sat back down and looked at Derek. “The rat, my dear old man. It was on Tuesday. Today is Friday, Derek: FRIDAY!” Just as Clive said “FRIDAY!”, I also heard him meow, outside the headphones. So that’s what it sounds like when a cat shouts. Clive continued: “Derek, my dear; please. It was only three days ago. Have things got that bad? Have you taken your medication? I knocked your pills off the top of the bathroom cabinet and into the sink. What more do I have to do to remind you?” Of course, I could say nothing but I was trying to will Derek on. If only I could talk; If only I could translate Clive for Derek.

“Has he brought you any presents lately?” Hannah asked. “He looks like a very generous and caring person.” Derek looked down at Clive. ‘Come on, Derek!’, I thought. The poor man shook his head. ‘Someone help Derek!’ Then Hannah said “I think young Clive here has ingested some rat poison.”

“She’s very clever,” said Clive. Great minds think alike. Clive looked at Hannah: “I assume you know what that man over there is doing?” Had Clive rumbled me, or was it a rhetorical question? I wished I could talk to him. Then he said a very strange thing: “I can feel the force in this room.”

Clive got back into his transport. Derek was given some pills for Clive. Hannah looked at me as she showed them out; And I could only hope that everything would be okay.

“How did that go?” Hannah asked when she returned.

“More questions than answers at the moment,” I said. For a moment, I didn’t know what to say next. Then, “Who’s next?” Doctor Jones looked at her notes.

“A young lady called Amy and her Scottish Terrier, Frank.” Hannah gave one of those false smiles which TV news presenters do when they’re really not sure how they’re supposed to react to a story. “I fear this might be the last time we see Frank. He’s not been well for quite a while.” I wondered if now might be the time to disconnect from the Babel fish. Soon enough though, Amy and Frank were in the room.

Frank was a splendid looking old man: A distinguished little Scots gent with a long, thick beard, he was small and stout. I could imagine having a wee dram with Frank in a tavern somewhere. He stood on Doctor Jones’ table, looking alternately at Amy, Hannah and the table.

Amy was a storybook personified: A slim volume, with much dark material and turmoil between the covers. She was young but she had clearly lived her life: Stories were printed on her skin and carved into her arms. She was a work of modern art; She was sculpted from life; She was unconventional; She was beautiful. And she was troubled: If only the Babel fish could tune into her thoughts.

“How are you?” Hannah asked Amy, in a tone which suggested a tired but resigned familiarity; As though Hannah wanted to ask more but knew that she’d never be able to probe into that deep soul of a girl.

Amy was small – almost frail – but her soul leaked from her eyes. I paraphrased The Beautiful South in my mind, as I estimated Amy’s age: ‘Take a look at these crow’s feet (just look), sitting on the prettiest eyes; Thirty twenty fifth of Decembers, twenty nine fourth of Julys…’.

“Yeah, okay,” said Amy. “Better than him.” She nodded down at Frank.

I thought about stopping the whole thing: Just leaving the Babel fish and walking away. This was precisely why Hannah couldn’t use it. The only thing that made me put on the headphones, was the thought that Frank might say something which would give Amy hope.

I typed ‘Canine’ into the Babel fish and was presented with a list of options: ‘Lupine’, ‘Vulpine’ and so on. If I so desired, I could listen to wolves, dingos and all sorts of other dogs, if they were ever to find themselves in Hannah’s consulting room. If I’d entered ‘Feline’ instead of ‘Cat’ for Clive, presumably I’d have seen all of the cat family too. In its current location, the Babel fish program was clearly aimed more at domesticated animals, but the algorithms seemed to be in there for pretty much everything. I typed in the search box again: Simply ‘Dog’, and immediately got static feedback in my ears as the slider appeared on screen once more.

“…Och, dear.” Frank’s voice was like that of hard drinking Glaswegian smoking a Woodbine. He had a Scottish, Cockney accent. “Och, dear.” I wished I could give the little old boy a hot toddy. “Och, dear.” Frank looked up at Amy: “Och, dear.” He looked over at Hannah: “Och, dear.” He looked down at the table and around the room: “Och, deary, deary me…”

I placed the headphones around my neck for a moment and listened to Doctor Jones and Hannah:

“It’s for the best,” said Hannah. It was a cliché, but that’s what she said. I had to resist artistic license, and record things as they were for the magazine article: Factual. Assuming the article would be read of course: It was a huge scientific story which could change the world. Only two people knew about the Babel fish though. I wasn’t some qualified expert and no-one read my writing anyway. If anyone read this in a factual publication, they’d probably think it the work of a crank and dismiss it. It would read more like one of my stock in trade whimsical stories. The truth is often stranger than fiction. “I’m sorry.”

Amy looked at Hannah and gave one of those newsreader smiles: neither happy nor sad. Then she looked at Frank. I put the headphones back on.

“…Och, dear.”

How was I to write, in scientific terms, about what happened next, when the words I wanted to use, which best conveyed the moment, were merely sentimental? I had a wet face.

Hannah held Frank’s hand and Amy hugged her little old, rugged, bearded Cockney Scotsman. If he’d been wearing a tartan cap, that’s when it would have slipped.

“Och, dear.”

That little dog, with such a limited vocabulary; Once heard through the Babel fish, he had a voice. Just those two words were emphasised by feeling and inflection as they took on different meanings: Pity for himself and love for all around him. Of all the times to reflect on that day, the most poignant was when Frank closed his eyes: “Och, dear. That’s better. A wee sleep…”

Hannah left the room for a while and I looked at Frank on the table, through salty eyes. I thought of what I’d said to Hannah earlier about all of this: Questions, ideas, thoughts. Now I could really understand and would even defend Hannah’s resistance to the Babel fish. But to the fiction writer; to me in my job, it was a game changer. I was lost and confused in a long silence.

I remembered Victoria Wood and Julie Walters, the two white mice under the table where I’d been sitting. In the hands of a better writer, the mice would be protrusions of multi-dimensional beings into our universe, conducting experiments on humans. Of course, humans always thought it was the other way around: Such brilliant subtlety.

Hannah was out of the room, so I placed the mouse cage nearer to the microphone and returned to the Babel fish program. I typed into the search field: “White mice” and moved the scanning bar across the screen with the computer mouse. I peered over the monitor and my two mice were facing one another, cleaning their faces with their paws and twitching their noses; Being mice.

“…The best laid plans of mice.” It sounded like a child who’d inhaled helium. ‘And men,’ I thought. But that story had already been written. I didn’t speak, just as I couldn’t speak to Hannah about all that I’d heard. Nor Derek, nor Amy.

“It’s working”: Another high-pitched voice. “There’s only one human left, over there.”

“Do you know what they’re doing, humans? While they rush around, scavenge and make a mess?” There was a pause. “No, neither do they.”

“Aren’t they supposed to be aphrodisiacs?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“Do you think that one knows what’s going on?” For once, I was the subject of a discussion, between two higher beings.

“It probably can’t even hear us.”

“Imagine if it could. Not just us but all the others as well. If only they could hear the dawn chorus. All those voices: The sopranos in harmony with the baritone of the sun: Earth’s choir. Then they’d hear the whispers from the trees, the humming of the clouds and the ghosts in the wind. But they don’t listen.”

“Maybe one day they’ll understand. Perhaps they’re not ready yet. They just need to slow down and think more.”

Maybe one day we will.

Until then, this story is both a beginning and an end. Myself and Doctor Jones were still at an impasse regarding the Babel fish and I was siding with her. Perhaps some things are better left as they are, like so many things which might have been.

We left the room together. I could say nothing. But I wondered: Why would she insist on me calling her by her first name, when she wouldn’t call me by mine? She knew my name: It was on her paperwork. Then I got it: I’d never asked her to.

Some of the most amazing things can happen right in front of your eyes, but only if you realise they’re happening. If you’re not paying attention, they can just happen and be gone, without you realising that they were practically up your nose.

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3
The Babel fish

“If you want to see differently, listen.”

I always dine with a guest, and tonight’s was a creeping obsession. Given the nature of my work, I normally dine alone, but the guest is one chosen from the many who share my mind. I can live with many, but can only question one at a time to find out if it’s the best pursuit of my aim: To talk with the animals.

I tried to place the enormity of the previous day into some sort of context. But even though I’m a writer, there were insufficient words to explain it, no matter how numerous and intertwined I made them. Less is more in literature. Suffice it to say, I’d listened to animals talking. I’d heard white mice speaking:

“If only they could hear the dawn chorus. All those voices: The sopranos in harmony with the baritone of the sun: Earth’s choir. Then they’d hear the whispers from the trees, the humming of the clouds and the ghosts in the wind. But they don’t listen.”

It’s always after the event that you realise what you should have said, or asked. Of course, by then it’s too late: An event has been created and there’s no way of going back to change it. Such is the nature of life and of space time: Both are the natural scheme of things, intricately woven together.

The night before the morning I found myself writing this, this story could have been so different. Mine was a story with a protagonist but without a hero. I’d returned home with two white mice and Doctor Hannah Jones had gone on somewhere else. I didn’t think to ask where that might be and she didn’t think to tell me. Every story needs a hero and I certainly wasn’t it.

I hoped the doctor wasn’t mistaking my obsession with the Babel fish for one with her. There was everything to admire, including her invention of a universal translation device in said fish.

The Babel fish was a computer program, named after the fictional universal translation device invented by Douglas Adams. Simply put, it could translate any language into any other, including animal languages. Using a wide frequency range, the Babel fish could hear animal sounds which are inaudible to humans. Either that, or it read minds. In any case, the upshot was, that it could translate any animal language into any human one. The reversal of this was still at a research stage, but there was nothing to make me think that it couldn’t translate my words into ones which each different animal would understand. If so, I would have something which I could devote my life to writing about. Hannah had something which could win her a Nobel prize, but she’d need persuasion to even continue her research.

Who might be a hero to Doctor Jones? She herself was probably in her late twenties or early thirties. She was small: short and slim. She had long, red hair, which gave a fiery frame to a pretty bespectacled face. She was intelligent, intuitive and witty. She was perhaps a little guarded, maybe introverted. I was an extrovert on paper: I could be anything in the words which spilled from my typewriter. If anyone were to read those words, they might find me. As it stood, I was just like Hannah, but without the red hair and probably less intelligent, intuitive and witty. The only thing I had over her was about 10-15 years.

I wondered how my two white mice might perceive the situation. I wouldn’t know, because I couldn’t hear what they were saying without Doctor Jones. If I spoke, would they understand me?

“You see,” I said. “The thing is. Well, the things are, I suppose. I wonder if I should be writing about all of this. I’m not even sure what I’m writing about, let alone what it might become or where it may end up. It has so much potential, yet I’m not sure I’m the right person to be in charge of something so important. Should I let go, just walk away and let someone else finish what I’ve started? What might someone else think of all this? Would they use it for their own gains, or simply dismiss it? The latter remains a problem, even if I do decide to write about it.”

The mice carried on being mice, so I decided to sleep on it.

When I awoke, it was still there: The next day, the problem still existed. And so did the mice.

I couldn’t just blunder into the PDSA in New Cross again. I’d done that twice already, most recently with the two white mice, Victoria and Julie, and I’d heard them talking. Doctor Jones also had an electron microscope, for looking at really tiny things, like viruses and bacteria: There were clues that there might be whole other universes in the sub-atomic world. I looked around my studio: I hadn’t cleaned the place for a couple of days and it was getting quite dusty. I was reluctant to do the housework, for fear of the consequences which might befall countless microscopic things, which may or may not be there. I couldn’t take my entire living space to Doctor Jones. The logical thing to do would be to ask Hannah over. But I couldn’t do that as the studio was so dusty. And she wouldn’t want to carry the electron microscope over. I had reached an impasse in my story. I decided to phone the hospital.

Doctor Jones was unavailable. I asked if I might perhaps call back when she was free. Doctor Jones was unavailable for the rest of the day.

Was Hannah unwell? On annual leave? Abducted? Killed? Paranoia now joined obsession at the dining table.

“Doctor Jones isn’t available all day,” said reception.

“Will she be back tomorrow?”

“We don’t know. Is there a medical emergency? We have other vets.” No other ‘Vet’ would do. Might one of these “Other vets” be in Hannah’s lab at that very moment? In the very same room as the Babel fish? “Is there a medical emergency?,” reception said again. “Mr Fry?” That’s me. I looked at Victoria Wood and Julie Walters in their cage. I could perhaps argue that those two being in a cage was an emergency. But what would be the point of going to New Cross anyway, if the doctor I needed to see wasn’t there? “She’s on house calls today, Mr Fry.” I’d been rumbled. I hung up.

House calls: Care in the community. It was a logical progression of the little I’d learned up to then about Doctor Hannah Jones, although somewhat counter to her ethos of leaving work at the workplace, for fear of becoming even more emotionally attached to the animals. It was that fear which prevented her from using the very device she’d invented: The Babel fish. But in this respect, I supposed it was entirely different: She still wasn’t getting too attached to the patients by hearing them speak, then not being able to leave them, or feeling she had to take them home with her: She was visiting them in their own homes, where she couldn’t hear them speak. The fact remained that wherever she was, it wasn’t actually her that I needed, it was the machine.

But the Babel fish / Doctor Jones situation was a self-perpetuating one: One needed the other. It was like the TARDIS and The Doctor, with the Doctor refusing to get in the box. I had the makings of a story, but for that reluctant passenger.

It didn’t matter. What difference would it make if the story was never told? In my hands, none at all.

By a strange coincidence, none at all was the level of chance I’d assumed I had of hearing from Doctor Jones that day. Suddenly and for no apparent reason, my mobile phone rang: What were the chances? Probably one, to the power of the caller’s number, against. It was the animal hospital.

“Simon Fry?” That’s how I answer my phone: There’s always an upward inflection in my voice, which annoys me. It’s as though I’m questioning who I am.

“Mr Fry, it’s Doctor Jones.” Having just used my first name, I wondered why Hannah hadn’t introduced herself with hers. I guessed she was maintaining professional protocol. “From the hospital,” she said. I knew that: It was the hospital’s number calling me, and I knew that Doctor Jones worked there. She really was professional. “You called.” I had.

“Erm, yes. There’s something I’d like to show you.” Actually, I had nothing to show Hannah but if I’d merely said I’d like to talk to her about something, she might have suggested we did that over the phone, or dismissed me completely.

“Is it a patient?,” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. What on earth was I thinking?

Doctor Jones had appointments for the rest of the afternoon, but if I’d like to go to the hospital, she said she’d try to fit me in.

The waiting room was busier than before, with half a dozen patients besides me and my rabbit. I’d heard other animals speak when I’d used the Babel fish before, but it was rabbits that intrigued me. Because if you look a rabbit, any rabbit, directly in the eyes, they really look like they want to tell you something. All the animals could speak and I could hear them. I hadn’t discounted Douglas Adams’ theory on dolphins and mice, and I’d not yet heard a dolphin’s sounds translated, but for me it was rabbits. Much as I admired Douglas, I wondered if he’d missed something. I was continuing his work. I believed that it was the rabbits who could tell us the answer, to life, the universe, and everything.

I pondered a little riddle to bide the time, about the animals in that room: Here were six animals and between them, they had 18 legs. If there were no means of seeing the animals in the room, what might people suppose them to be, based on the collective number of legs alone?

There were two cats in baskets: One was a tabby and the other was black, with a white chest: It looked like it was dressed for dinner, in a black suit and white shirt.

There were two dogs, from the polar extremes of the canine world: A huge, furry beast, the size of a small horse, and a tiny little Chihuahua cross breed thing. It looked like it probably yapped a lot, and as though it’s bulbous eyes would pop out if it was squeezed firmly enough.

All domestic dogs share a common ancestor in the grey wolf and as such, any canine can cross breed with any other. Theoretically then, given a step ladder, the little dog could mate with the larger one in the waiting room and produce offspring: What curious things those would be.

The other two patients were a mynah bird in a cage and a Burmese python around a young girl’s shoulders. Given the mynah bird’s famous ability to mimic human sounds in captivity, I wondered if the Babel fish might be redundant if I were to have an opportunity to listen to the bird. The python looked to be quite young, at around ten feet in length. Docile and inquisitive, as those snakes are, it was tasting the air with its forked tongue. I’d taken an instant dislike to the small bug-eyed dog and I crossed my fingers for no reason at all.

“Mr Fry?” That’s me. It was Doctor Jones.

“Yes, that’s me.”

Hannah didn’t even wait until we were on the other side of the door before she said the sort of curious thing I’d heard on my previous visits. In fact, I clearly heard her mumble it as soon as I stood up: “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Charles was quite reluctant to cross the room on his lead, so I picked him up and carried him.

As we walked into Doctor Jones’ examination room, she was reading from her notes: “Charles Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. A rabbit. Really?”

“Well, I had to think quickly as I filled out the form. You see, I only picked him up on the way here.”

“He’s on a fucking lead.” For someone so pretty, she had a very potty mouth.

“Yes. He’s a house rabbit. Actually, he’s a flat rabbit: I live in a flat. I don’t have a garden and even if I did, I wouldn’t want him all cooped up in a cage outside. Then I’d have to call him David Soul.” Doctor Jones looked at me with a slightly surprised face. “Because,” I continued, “then he’d be Starsky, in a hutch you see?”

“Oh, I see. Believe me, I see.”

“He just looked so sad in the shop, like he wanted to tell me something. And I couldn’t carry a hutch here, so I got him a nice lead. It suits him, don’t you think?”

“He suits you, Mr Fry.”

“Yes, so I thought I’d bring Charles for an initial check-up.”

“Really? Nothing to do with the Babel fish then?” She was very clever. “Fine.”: Result. “I do have other patients to see, Mr Fry. Charles looks like a fine rabbit to me. Same as before: You sit in the corner and try to just,” she paused, “not be here.” A splendid plan.

The first patient was the cat in the DJ: His name was Eddie, and his human was a lady, probably in her late 40s, called Liz. Liz would perhaps have been a little unconventional outside of Lewisham, or London for that matter: Clearly a little eccentric and perhaps a tad over made-up, but completely at ease within herself. She wore a bright red tunic with a faux fur collar, over a frilly white dress shirt, the cuffs extending flamboyantly from beneath her coat. She had hair which was jet black, but for a white streak which ran through her parting: Whether it was exposed roots or a flourish of peroxide, it didn’t matter. Liz wore tight black leather trousers, cut short at the ankle to accentuate her silver anklet. She wore bright red shoes with stiletto heels and she tottered a little.

“So what’s troubling Eddie?” Hannah asked.

“Well, I don’t know really,” Liz said, in a surprisingly masculine voice. Liz was just as at home in himself as he was in this part of London, or anywhere: What a wonderful person. Liz continued: “He’s just not been going out so much.”

I was so enamoured by Liz that I almost forgot to put the headphones on. The microphone was either still above Hannah’s table from the last time I’d been there, or she’d replaced it in expectation of my making a return visit.

I switched the Babel fish on and heard a familiar static feedback as I typed in ‘Cat’. Then I slid the mouse pointer across the screen, before picking up Eddie’s voice:

“…drilling.” Eddie’s voice was male but effeminate. I only caught the last word and it sounded like “Drilling”: For what? Eddie continued: “Pour tout ce qui est derrière le mur. Vous ne le sentez?”

How naive I must have been to assume that all animals spoke in English. Eddie was drilling for whatever was behind the wall. Surely just a cavity? A dead mouse perhaps.

“So, he’s normally an outdoors chap?” Hannah had a remarkable ability to anthropomorphise animals. Eddie was certainly a “Chap”.

“All the time, except when he needs food.”

“Je suis un, ‘ow you say, chat de ruelle?” Alley cat. “Vous pensez que vous me entendez ronronnement. Je perce.” You think you hear me purr: I drill.

Hannah conducted the familiar physical examination of a cat: Lifting Eddie’s lips to check his gums and checking his nostrils for moisture. Humans owned by cats frequently ask if a dry, warm nose means their cat is sick. The short answer is no. A healthy cat’s nose can vary between wet and dry several times over the course of a day. And there are many reasons a cat can have a dry, warm nose that have nothing to do with health.

“Elle est très jolie.”

Next, Doctor Jones squeezed Eddie’s belly, picking his rear end up so that his front paws remained on the table. She was checking his gut for blockages or perhaps a twisted colon.

“Je suis un chat, pas une brouette.” If ever there were a feline Star Trek, Eddie would play Doctor McCoy.

Then Hannah lifted Eddie’s tail to check for signs of worms.

“Oh l’humanité!”

“I can’t see that there is anything at all wrong with this young man,” Hannah said to Liz. He’s a cat. He looks like the kind of cat who just likes being a cat. I’d just let him get on with doing that. If he shows any obvious signs of not being himself, by all means bring him back in, but for now, I can’t see anything at all to worry about.”

“Okay”. Somehow, Liz didn’t seem at all surprised. Eddie made his own independent way into his basket.

“Ma couverture. Tapis magique. Emmenez moi au le Catnip.” Eddie was on drugs: What a fantastic cat he was.

I didn’t get a chance to speak to Doctor Jones. Not long after Liz and Eddie had left, Hannah returned with an elderly lady and the mynah bird.

Part of the starling family, mynah birds are remarkably intelligent, and famed for their ability to mimic the sounds they hear around them. “Myna” is derived from the Hindi language mainā, which itself is derived from Sanskirt madanā. I was especially intrigued by this patient, because it’s mimicry of the sounds around it may be just that, or it could be that the Babel fish was able to translate its voice into something different; perhaps something entirely unexpected.

I tuned the Babel fish in: “….Yes dear,” was what I heard through the headphones, as the bird said “Yes dear”.

Doctor Jones looked at her notes, then at the old lady. “So this is Ronnie?”

“Yes dear,” said the lady.

“Yes dear,” said the bird.

“And what’s the problem?”

“Well,” said the old girl, “He’s got a problem with his foot.”

“Foot, yes,” said the bird.

“He keeps holding it up all the time.”

“Time, yes.”

“It’s like he’s in pain,” the lady said.

“Pain, yes,” said the bird. He clearly had a condition known in humans as Echolalia.

“And it’s always the same leg?” Hannah was being intuitive again.

“Leg, yes,” said the mynah bird.

“I think so,” said the old lady.

I was a little bored to be honest, so I twiddled with the controls on the Babel fish. Doctor Jones continued to ask the old lady questions and the mynah bird kept repeating the last few words the old dear said. For a moment, I completely lost the conversation. Then as I tuned back in, the mynah bird said something quite unexpected:

“…unexpected, yes.” I couldn’t be sure if I’d heard that through the headphones or in the room. I didn’t even hear a diagnosis or a prognosis. I was figuratively floored.

Hannah, the old lady and the mynah bird had left the room. I remembered Charles Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, on the floor. I looked down at him and he looked up at me. He had that rabbit look, like he really wanted to say something.

I grabbed the microphone and typed ‘Rabbit’ into the Babel fish. I pointed the mic at my rabbit: Nothing.

“Well?” I said.

I lifted his ears and laid the microphone on the floor in front of him: Nothing. Surely he’d heard me? Did I have an ironic, deaf rabbit?

Hannah was out of the room, so I unplugged the headphones. Maybe they were faulty. Perhaps Charles was trying to say something and I hadn’t heard him.

I turned the speakers on the computer up to 11. I blew into the microphone to make sure it was working: Charles didn’t even flinch at what sounded like a clap of thunder.

“Aren’t you going to tell me the answer? To life, the universe and everything? Or explain why the answer is 42? Because we’ve been asking the wrong questions? Isn’t the earth just one big organic computer, designed to work it all out? I’m carrying on Douglas’ work. I’ve listened to mice. I’ve not translated dolphins. But the mice said the answers could be heard in nature: In the dawn chorus, in the wind, and all around us. And that’s beautiful music, but it’s not a voice. The planet must have a voice. So I theorised that the answer lies with rabbits, and the way you all look like you want to say something. And now I’m talking to you, and you’re all ears. And now I’ve got a deaf and dumb rabbit? What’s anyone supposed to ask you?” I was shouting at a rabbit, and the rabbit still looked like it was about to say something. But it didn’t.

Eventually, I left: In frustration, I left the room and I left that cloth eared rabbit there.

I walked along the corridor between the examination room and the waiting area. As I got closer to the exit, I could hear Hannah’s voice but it was mixed up with others. Then someone, somewhere, said the oddest thing:

“I don’t really know how to say this.”

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4
Embryos

You only have to grasp the infinite size and possibilities of the universe, to see that all you’ve learned from science fiction is fact. At least, that was my standard line when people asked why I was a sci-fi writer. The other was, I’d always wanted to be a scientist or a writer. When it turned out I was no good at either, I became a sci-fi writer. And some say I’m quite good at that.

Recently I’d been pursuing a subject which wasn’t yielding to me: Talking with animals.

My research centred around a quantum computer program, called the Babel fish. It could do what Douglas Adams’ real fish could do: Translate any language to and from any other. Unfortunately, this Babel fish was at the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals in New Cross. It was the invention of Doctor Hannah Jones, who worked there. She’d been very accommodating but the nature of her work meant that she tried to avoid any emotional involvement with her patients. The upshot of this was that she wasn’t prepared to share her invention and discoveries with the rest of the world. Yet I was convinced that the Babel fish could provide all the answers, to life, the universe, and everything. I was sure the keys lay with the animals. But I wasn’t sure what questions I needed to pose to which animals, so that the answers I got made some sort of contextual sense.

I pondered other options and hit upon an alternative: Humans. Of course, this was a resource freely available to me but I didn’t know the right kind of humans. I figured, wouldn’t it be great if I could ask questions of famous scientists? If there was a way to speak to Einstein for example, and to furnish him with all of the research tools and knowledge we have in the twenty first century, someone like him might be able to work it all out.

I’d watched Jurassic Park, so I knew how the resurrection thing worked. Now I needed a scientist I could work with. Just as with Doctor Hannah Jones, the Babel fish and the animals, the relationship could be a symbiotic one: The scientist would allow me to study their work and in return, I’d write about it and bring the work to the attention of other academics, or even the general public. What could possibly go wrong?

I believe that anything is possible: I remember my mum telling me that one of her friends used to be a man but that now she was taking medicine to make her more like a woman, and it made her feel better. It was literally that easy to explain it to a kid. I wanted to make seemingly impossible things believable.

I wondered who I might contact to work with me on this project. It wasn’t something I could bother the mainstream with too much, as it was theoretical. I needed someone on the fringe. Being a writer, I understand the importance of researching and verifying things when reporting on them. As such, I have a network of contacts in various fields with whom I can consult on different topics.

Eventually my enquiries led me to Gilbert Giles. I like alliterative names, so he fitted the bill. Gilbert was based in Norway, where he was a tour guide on a ship which sailed around the Norwegian coast. I wondered if this might make him a fjord escort. He was due to visit the UK two days hence, so we arranged to meet.

There are certain constants in life: McDonald’s, Wetherspoons, any multinational coffee outlet. No matter which branch, in which country, the wares will be the same. I find uniformity comforting. Sometimes the only way to tell you’re in a particular geographic location, is by observing the people: Unlike the food and drinks, the people are always different. This extends to their personal habits and mannerisms. It is perfectly acceptable, normal in fact, to dunk one’s croissant in one’s coffee in Paris. Actually, I’ve never been to Paris but I consider myself continental. A Parisian in Lewisham though, might attract curious glances from the locals, as I found.

I’d had the chance to go to Paris a while back but the way things were in my life then, I couldn’t solemnly promise those close to me, nor myself, that I’d return, so I’d declined. I had an open invitation to visit Berlin any time and for as long as I’d like. But what was true of Paris was more so with Berlin. That was a trip at the end of my bucket list; perhaps the last thing I’d ever do, so convinced was I that I’d not be able to tear myself away once there.

“Mr Fry?” That’s me.

“That’s me,” I said, looking up at the man now standing at my table. Gilbert was taller than me. I could tell this, even though I was sitting down. He was a modern day Viking; a Nordic hipster. “Sit down,” I offered, wishing he would. He did, quite obediently.

Gilbert had a somehow soothing accent: Think Skandi-Scot and you get the idea. It was when he started dunking his croissant in his coffee that I realised we’d get along just fine.

We discussed Norway, which I knew very little about. Gilbert showed me his published papers, which he said were peer-reviewed. He was mainly interested in extinct species of wildlife, and his research centred on fossilised remains, buried and preserved in the Norwegian ice. He hoped that nature’s deep freeze might have preserved tissues in the animals, making it possible to extract intact DNA and theoretically, to resurrect extinct species. Just like in Jurassic Park. The eventual aim was to bring some species back, to start gradually repairing ecosystems damaged by man. It wasn’t yet possible to reverse climate change, but this was one of many efforts to slow its effects. This wasn’t to be an Ice Age theme park, and nothing spectacular: There’d be no woolly mammoths or sabre toothed tigers, although I did wonder at how splendid that might be. The long-term plan was to re-populate the lower levels of the food chain, so that threatened or endangered species further up could flourish and increase their numbers. It was all very admirable but could the methods be used with human DNA? Well, similar techniques and others are constantly being developed and it has been possible to clone mammals since the end of the last century. This in itself gave me a thought: Dolly the sheep was famously the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell (that we know of), using the process of nuclear transfer. I wondered what it might be like to bring Dolly back and hear what she had to say through the Babel fish.

Cloning humans is of course surrounded by all sorts of mechanisms to ensure that we don’t actually do it. There are deep ethical and moral issues involved, and most philosophers agree that cloning humans would generally be a bad idea. Resurrecting a human is simply a case of cloning, like with Dolly, only using DNA from the person to be cloned, rather than of that of a sheep. Obviously.

So my initial conversation with Gilbert had been a little anti-climatic. But the reason he’d agreed to meet me was my seeming determination, he said. He realised how much work and research must have been undertaken to find him: Specifically a scientist with a sideline on the fringe who’d only shared his work with a select few like-minded people.

My persistence had effectively gained me unwitting entry to an underground network. I wondered at what other possibilities this opened up. I asked Gilbert if perhaps he’d like to join me for some dinner and a drink at a hotel I rather liked. He was staying Airbnb but he said he’d be happy to join me for the evening to discuss matters further.

The Station Hotel in Hither Green is a gastro pub, with what I’m told are some nice rooms upstairs. It’s a large Grade II listed building, near to Hither Green station, on the Lee Green side, not the Catford side of the railway: a metal ruler. The interior is cosy and eclectic, and they serve very good food. Gilbert had beer battered North sea cod, while I went for roasted fillet of sea trout, and we shared three bottles of a decent white wine. And we talked:

“So, Mr Fry,” Gilbert said. “What is it that’s made you go to so much trouble to contact me, specifically? What is it you’re looking for?” It was a very simple question, with many answers. But I felt I could be frank. I was relaxed in Gilbert’s company, only slightly aided by the Pinot Grigio.

“To be honest with you, Gilbert…” I started.

“You can call me Gil.” We were on single-syllable terms already. Should I suggest that he call me ‘Si’? I’d never been called that. I’d always kept my second syllable intact: ‘mon’. If he called me Si, I’d be Si Fry. I quite liked that. But I didn’t say anything.

“The thing is…” I paused. “The thing is, Gil. Well, the things are, you know? Everything. Life, the universe, and everything. I just want to know what it’s all about, you see? I suppose I’ve reached a certain age.”

“How old are you Mr Fry?”

“How old do you think?”

“Mid forties?” I’d take that.

“I’ll take that,” I said. “Well, all that time, I’ve just been thinking, wondering. I wonder at what point things got complicated. When we’re children, everything is so much simpler. Of course, we’re shielded from much in childhood, but I got hold of the belief that anything could have a simple answer, if we didn’t over-analyse too much. Of course, that goes against a lot of what I do as a job. When I’m writing non-fiction, I have to check, verify and interrogate, so that I can report the facts in a balanced way. And some of the things I’ve seen, some of what I’ve written about, make me wish for a simpler life and question why things are the way they are. I suppose you could say that almost my entire life has been one long existential crisis.”

“But we already know that the answer is 42, Mr Fry.”

“Well, of course it is Gil. But what does that mean? What is the question we need to ask, in order for that answer to make any kind of sense to us? Or were we asking the wrong questions in the first place? You see, this latest brain fart of mine started when I was listening to Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell. There’s a song called Keep Talking, which samples Stephen Hawking’s quote: ‘For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination: we learned to talk.’”

“Yes, I know it,” Gil said. “All we have to do, is keep talking.” He had a curious smile: Like he was holding a pipe in his mouth, without holding a pipe in his mouth. Or having a mild stroke.

“Well, yes Gil. So I just thought, well wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could all talk? What if there were no language barriers, and any race or creed could talk with any other, and understand each other, without the need for interpretors? Wouldn’t that be constructive? Couldn’t that be only a good thing for the world? So then I thought of the bigger picture, and wondered what it would be like if we could talk with the animals. Imagine what they could tell us.”

“If only the Babel fish were real.” Gil smiled again, or had another stroke.

“If only,” I said. Although I trusted Gilbert now, I couldn’t be sure how much of that trust was displaced by Pinot. Only two people knew about the Babel fish and one of them wanted nothing to do with it. I was the other one and I’d not written about Dr Jones’ computer program in any of my online scientific papers. No-one was reading my fiction and anyone who did, would think the stories of the Babel fish too fantastical to be anything other than fiction. “You never know,” I continued. “Douglas Adams was right about a lot of other things, and most of the world’s ocean depths are unexplored. We’re constantly discovering new species down there. Who’s to say there might not be Babel fish out there somewhere?”

“Well, certainly no-one could say for sure. The Babel fish cannot therefore be definitely denied. A bit like God really.” As Gil said ‘God’, he raised two fingers on either side of his head, and wiggled them like pink quote marks. “And as the good book pointed out, Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters entitled Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway? were to be followed by a fourth book. He used the Babel Fish argument as a basis for a fourth book, titled Well, That About Wraps It Up For God.” The good book to which Gilbert referred was of course The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The next thing he said, found me unprepared: “So, Mr Fry. What do you mean when you say Douglas got a lot of other things right?”

“Well,” I said. “Well,” I said again. “Well, there’s a lot of social commentary in the book.” And indeed there is.

“And indeed there is, Mr Fry.” Great minds…

“Yes.” I needed to move this on. “So, going back to the big questions: I thought, other humans who’d be good to speak with, would be those no longer with us. Specifically, great minds of the past. What if we could use all that resurrection stuff to bring back a great mind, to see what that person makes of things, given all the more we know now than they did in their time?”

“You didn’t think to use your research? I mean, to find out if anyone was conducting research into animal languages? I mean, we’ve known for some time that many animals use sounds which we can’t even hear, because they’re beyond our audible range. We know that dolphins, whales, and elephants, for example, probably have quite complex languages. Did you not think someone might already be looking into something far greater?”

“I suppose I surmised that anyone who was up to that sort of thing, wouldn’t want anyone to know, for fear of ridicule. Of course, I know there are entire branches of science studying animal languages. People are interpreting those languages, but no-one is looking to translate them, so that anyone can understand them. That would be something too profound perhaps for humanity itself to comprehend. My point is, if it is going on, I wasn’t going to find out about it. But through my research, I learned a lot about electron microscopes and the tiny worlds they allow us to see into. I found that fascinating, with all of the applications in various sciences. So I started thinking about the really small things, instead of the really big stuff: Things like gene editing, DNA mapping and so on. That led to me questioning the matter of cloning, and whether I could clone a scientist. And that led me eventually to you.”

“I haven’t cloned any scientists, Mr Fry. In fact, I’ve not cloned anything yet.”

“But it’s been done before.”

“Well, yes. With Dolly the sheep and many others. What it hasn’t been used for is bringing back the dead. We’re not at the Jurassic Park stage yet, Mr Fry. There are questions of ethics; Profound questions for humanity. I am looking merely to resurrect ancient organisms, so that I may first study them alive and then, only after thorough further research, just possibly reintroduce them to the food chain. But these are invertebrate creatures. The kind of things which most people wouldn’t be able to tell from each other if you were to show them. The point is, things which I could bring back, for the good of all, without anyone noticing.”

“But it would be theoretically possible?”

“Well, yes. But even putting ethics aside, the sheer amount of resources needed to do it is a significant barrier. Scientists cloned a frog as long ago as the 1950s. But amphibians are different to mammals. They’re very different to humans. Since that first frog, researchers have cloned dozens of animal species, including mice, cats, sheep, pigs and cows. In each case, researchers encountered problems that needed to be overcome with trial and error. With mice, they were able to use thousands of eggs, and conduct many experiments, to work out these problems. It was a numbers game.

“But with primates, eggs are a very precious resource, and it is not easy to acquire them to conduct experiments, and the researchers can’t simply apply what they’ve learned from cloning mice or cows to cloning people. For example, cloning an animal requires that they first remove the nucleus of an egg cell. When they do this, they also remove proteins that are essential to help cells divide. In mice, this isn’t a problem, because the embryo that is ultimately created is able to make these proteins again. But primates aren’t able to do this, and researchers think it may be one reason that attempts to clone monkeys have failed.

“What’s more, cloned animals often have different kinds of genetic abnormalities that can prevent embryo implantation in a uterus, or cause the embryo to spontaneously abort, or the animal to die shortly after birth. These abnormalities are common, because cloned embryos have just one parent rather than two, which means that a molecular process known as “imprinting” does not occur properly in cloned embryos. Imprinting takes place during embryo development, and selectively silences certain genes from one parent or the other.

“Problems with imprinting can result in extremely large placentas, which ultimately leads to problems with blood flow for the embryo. In one experiment, a team cloned a species of cattle called Banteng, and the calf was born at twice the size of a normal Banteng cow. It had to be euthanized. So, you can see why it’s a moral and ethical minefield. Myself and others are looking to develop the science to overcome the problems, but with each hurdle jumped, so more ethical and moral issues become apparent. For now, human cloning is theoretical and possible only in the realms of all else which is fantastical: Fiction.”

“Well I’m known just as well for my fiction work as I’m not for my factual, Gil. I wonder if you might entertain a proposition?” We’d skipped desserts long ago and were now on our fifth shared bottle of Pinot.

“Entertain me, Mr Fry.” The invisible pipe was back in his mouth.

“Well, Gil…” I cleared my throat and looked around the room as I drew in closer to the table.

“The thing is this. I mean, the way I see it. The way I see things, is that you have something potentially very important and valuable in your work; Work which could one day net you a Nobel prize. But you need exposure. And yet, I understand your reasons for wanting to keep people in the dark for now. But if all of the ethical concerns are somehow overcome one day, there are potential future scenarios where your work could save humanity itself from extinction. Isn’t that worth documenting? And like I say, I’m of little note as a fiction writer, but even less so an academic one. If I were to work with you as documentarian and something went horribly wrong, it would be dismissed as the further chronicles of a slightly deranged fiction writer.”

“How do you propose studying my work? By visiting Norway?”

“No, of course not. That would be an imposition.” Actually, I was as reluctant to go there as I was Paris or Berlin, for the same reasons. “My proposition is just this: The best way for me to study your work, is for me to actually study your work, if that makes sense.” It didn’t seem to. “You see, the way I see it, you do all the scientific stuff in your lab and nature takes care of the rest.”

“That is a very simplistic way of looking at it, Mr Fry.”

“I like to boil things down to simple components, so that they’re easier to understand.”

Gil smiled again, on the left side of his mouth. It was a different smile to the previous ones, because it was on the other side: Those had been a curling of his upper lip on the right, when he’d seemed contemplative. A smile on the left seemed to indicate something else: Amusement? Perplexity? I elaborated: “You see, you make the life, and I watch it grow. If it grows – or indeed, goes – well, I’ll let you know and then we can talk about publicity or other applications. If it doesn’t go well, no-one will ever know. You need to have nothing further to do with me.”

“Mr Fry.” That’s me. “If you’re proposing what I think you are, then I must express deep alarm.”

“I prefer to think more of reservations than alarms, Gil. Alarms are loud and startling, and they indicate danger. Reservations on the other hand, those are nice. One might have a reservation at a nice restaurant for example, or a hotel.”

“Mr Fry, if I’ve got this right, you’re proposing that I send you a cloned animal of some sort?”

“No, Gil. No, much more than that.”

“Oh God.”

“You see, I’m interested in cloning humans. Ultimately, I’d like to bring back Albert Einstein, to see what he makes of the world today. But those are my interests. Your interest in cloning, is its potential to save lives, and even species. You’re concentrating on very small creatures: people won’t notice, or be troubled by the news that cloning is helping the environment. Gradually, cloning becomes more accepted. If cloning humans were ever accepted, there are of course all of those moral and ethical arguments. But cloning could one day be applied to humans in the same way as your small creatures. It could save humanity. But of course, there is the whole numbers game of trial and error, as well as the ethical concerns. I’m simply offering to be a volunteer in the early stages of your research.”

“By doing what? Observing something I’ve sent you? Am I missing something, Mr Fry?”

“I think you’re missing me, Gil. I would be a human guinea pig. I understand the ethics. What I’m proposing is that I give you the kind of permission which to my knowledge has never been requested or permitted of a living human: I give you my DNA to use in cloning experiments. Many copies of me will perish: Most people wouldn’t like the idea of that. But if just one clone shows signs of growth, you might be able to probe inside that one, to see what it is which makes it different: The survival code perhaps. Once you’ve got that, you’re on your way to a safe and reliable means of cloning humans.”

“Mr Fry, again you are simplifying things.”

“Mr Giles, I am a writer. When I write academic material, sometimes I have to simplify it for the reading demographic. When I write fiction, I demonstrate how something is possible and trust that readership to take the details for granted, or use their imagination. Ergo, when I am writing about scientific things, I do so in a way a reader understands and leave the sciencey bits to my collaborator. I do enough scientific research to ensure that my stories are feasible, then find a partner on the fringes who might be willing to help. I report on their work and it’s read as accessible fiction. And for myself and my collaborators, it’s a symbiotic relationship.”

“So what you’re asking me to do, Mr Fry, is to take a sample of your DNA, remove the nucleus of a donor egg and replace it with yours, thereby creating clones of you, most of which will most likely perish?”

“That’s what I’m proposing, Gil. What I’m asking, is for you to then send me one or more of those subjects, so that I can observe it. It would be all under-the-radar stuff, on the fringe, you know? Where the likes of me and you work?” I was trying camaraderie, cloak and dagger skulduggery. We were underground operatives, secret agents, independently working to make the world a better place, ungoverned and accountable only to ourselves.

“Mr Fry?” That’s me. I was drifting in my thoughts. “Mr Fry. If, and this is a big if, Mr Fry. Perhaps this conversation only got this far because of the wine, but I must admit I’m intrigued. So if I were help you, you must first consider a number of things: I would be given total anonymity. You would monitor one experiment, which will most likely not be successful. In that almost certain scenario, I would insist that you dispose of any evidence promptly. You may write of it, recording the process of the subject. In all likelihood, if that written record were to somehow be disseminated, it would be assumed to be fiction. If there is any need for this to be reinforced, I’d trust you to do so.”

“Your anonymity is guaranteed Mr Giles, until such time as the experiments might be successful and you wish to publish your results. Otherwise, the whole thing will remain as fiction. But there were other things, you said?”

“Practical things, yes. Things which are not necessarily a problem for me with my resources, but which you need to grasp the ethics of. For example, the availability of human donor eggs.” Actually, I hadn’t thought of that.

“Actually, I hadn’t thought of that.” I knew we’d need eggs, of course. I hadn’t considered where they might come from. Women, naturally, but not which ones. Obviously, women donate eggs for various reasons, sometimes in the hope that they might be fertilised at a later date, but usually this would be in the course of family planning. There were human eggs which were donated purely for scientific research. The cloning process only requires the DNA of one parent; in this case, me. The egg would just be a carrier; a vessel. But it was the thought that in any case, the egg will have come from someone. I would never know the identity of the donor and she wouldn’t expect me to. But even though her DNA would be removed, that still involved removing a part of someone. It was a thought which would continue to trouble me perhaps, but in the context of the research, it was something I could level with morally. “Anything Else?” I asked Gil.

“The limitations, Mr Fry. The whole numbers game aside, even if you do end up with a viable subject, its life will be limited. No human embryo has survived outside of the human body for longer than 13 days. After less than two weeks, your subject will be no larger than a grain of sand in a test tube and it will expire. That’s a version of you, Mr Fry, dying in your presence.”

That was quite profound. I would indeed be witness to my own death, or a version of me, with perhaps more potential than I ever had, to do more than I ever did. A second chance at life, gone. I decided it might be worth it, just for the profundity of that situation, to feel what it’s like and to write about it. It would be a personal loss different to any other. ‘I think I’ll do it,’ I thought. “I think I’ll do it,” I said.

“Very well, Mr Fry. When I return to my facility in Norway, I will acquire donor eggs and insert your donated DNA. I will of course require your DNA from you. I will place the eggs in a solution and the rest is a game of waiting. Very few of the eggs will do anything at all. Of the few that do, even fewer will survive. I cannot commit too many resources to this Mr Fry, for reasons I’m sure you appreciate. I will send you two specimens, in around two weeks from now. That will end my involvement in this, unless something happens which might be of importance to the greater scientific community.”

“That’s the deal, Mr Giles. I volunteer for something others probably wouldn’t, because I have my own vested interests. I understand that the experiment will most likely be unsuccessful, but if something does happen, I will let you know, so that you can identify whatever catalyst in me it was that caused something to happen. Ultimately, you may discover a key to life. Otherwise, it will remain fiction in my hands.”

“In that case, I need your hand, Mr Fry.” Why would he want that? “To collect a blood sample, Mr Fry? It’s better than a strand of hair or a mouth swab, for the purposes of this.”

“Oh, of course.” Either Gil had come prepared for this, or he normally carried a syringe and a vial around in his case. Not for the first time in my life, I felt a bit of a prick.

But after much initial faffing around, I now had the start of a two-pronged go at doing something worthwhile.

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5
The Rabbit

I woke the next morning and realised it must be Thursday. For me, Thursday is the day of the week I find hardest getting the hang of: It’s well into the working week, which grows monotonous; and it’s one day away from the start of the weekend, and all which that might entail. For most people. For me, the only difference between days, is the letters which precede ‘day’. So I really don’t know why I find it so difficult.

On this particular Thurs, I woke with a hangover: A rare thing for me but hardly surprising given the evening before. Had I really given my DNA to a man I’d met for the first time? A scientist on the fringes of accepted science, who could now use my DNA for his own ends? Might he actually now have the one thing which he needed to create a race of slave humans, from a volunteer made complicit by Pinot Grigio? Apparently so, as confirmed by a non-disclosure agreement Gil had sent me by email after the meeting, and which I’d signed.

I contemplated what to do on this Thursday: The studio was in need of a clean, there was still the matter of the two white mice, and the rabbit which wasn’t there. Sometimes you don’t realise something’s missing until it’s not there any more. It’s was the absence of the rabbit which reminded me of its existence. I remembered being at the hospital the previous day and I was sure I didn’t have it with me at dinner with Gil: I’d left the rabbit at the hospital.

I checked my mobile and there’d been missed calls: two from the PDSA in New Cross, and one from an unknown mobile number. I called the hospital. Doctor Jones was with a patient, so she would call me back. I had to be patient.

Hannah called from work: I’d changed the entry on my phone from ‘PDSA’ to ‘Hannah, Work.’ in a tragic moment.

“Mr Fry.” That’s me. Hannah was addressing me in her official-sounding capacity.

“Yes.” I knew this would be about the rabbit. “Doctor Jones.” Then without thinking, I just said, “How are you today?”

“I’m fine. I do have a bit of a situation though.” This seemed slightly friendlier; more like Hannah. She was either resigned or being sarcastic; I couldn’t make out which. “I think it best if you come over here.” This sounded more serious. But actually it was best that I went to the hospital, as I had to collect the rabbit. Hannah was perhaps just stating the obvious.

A different day and another menagerie in the PDSA waiting room: On this particular Friday, there was a clowder of cats: A clowder or alternatively, a pounce are the collective nouns for cats. Probably the best-known collective noun is a murder, for a group of crows. But this is just for crows on the ground: In flight, they go by a different name; Or a profession, or vocation, such is the imagery I see as a writer in these things. As a writer, I wonder what crows who’d just committed a far-off murder might be talking about, back on the ground, after the deed. A gaggle of geese is another common one: What must geese be gaggling about? And they’re only a gaggle on the ground: In flight, it’s a skein of geese. There are some wonderful senses of lifestyles to be gleaned from animals’ collective nouns. To hear them talk as such groups would bring so many more stories to life: An interview with a flamingo, as part of a regiment, or herons involved in a siege. Honourable mentions go to my favourite two collective nouns: A tower of giraffes, and a crossing of zebras. But back to the pounce or the clowder in the waiting room:

There was a young girl of probably about ten, with her mum I assumed. They each had a cat in a basket: A black and white one which the girl referred to as “Cow cat!,” and a tabby, who the girl called Duncan. A lad not much older was with his assumed dad, and they had a toyger: A domestic cat with tiger markings, and a splendid little thing. I didn’t catch the toyger’s name but it had a bit of the Shere Khan from Jungle Book about it. If the ensuing situation with Doctor Jones permitted, I was interested in hearing what these cats might say.

“Mister. Fry.” That’s me. Doctor Jones was using the extended version of my name: Lengthening the ‘Mister’ and pausing before the ‘Fry.’ She’d done that the day before, when I’d brought the rabbit in. I looked up and Hannah exhibited a different body language: Rather than holding the door open with her arm, she was striking a pose which blocked the corridor behind her, by standing in the middle of the doorway. This looked defensive, which wasn’t good. “Come with me, please.” I followed her dutifully and quietly along the corridor to her lab.

Everything was more or less how I remembered it, and Charles was still there. He’d made a little home for himself. Someone had provided a cat basket, which he was sitting in, looking out, and still looking like he wanted to say something. The front of the basket was open and there were food and water bowls, and a litter tray just in front. He’d clearly used the litter tray: I’d trained him well in the short time I’d had him.

“You left your rabbit behind, Mr Fry.” This was obvious.

“I know,” I said. “I honestly didn’t realise until this morning.” Which I hadn’t.

“Well, Charles has been in safe hands.” I looked at Hannah’s hands.

“Well, obviously, and I’m grateful. It’s a bit like getting run over by an ambulance really. I mean, if you’re going to absent mindedly leave a rabbit somewhere, where better than a vets?” I was trying to break through the tension, as Doctor Jones still looked defensive.

“Not mine, Mr Fry. No, Charles has been in the safe hands of the police.” The police? What had he done?

“What did he do?” I asked.

“He scared the shit out of me, Mr Fry.”

“So you called the police on him? What did they say to him?”

“Oh Jesus.” I think that’s what Hannah said, as she was sort of talking to the collar of her coat. “No, Mr Fry. I left shortly after you last night. You were my last case and when you left, I had no reason to return to my lab. I was the first one in this morning. Today is Thursday and I open up on a Thursday. So I was alone in the building when I thought I heard a voice. I didn’t think too much of it, as I was in reception: It could have been someone walking past outside. So I was walking down the corridor to this lab, when I heard the voice again, but louder this time. As I got to that door…” She pointed to the door. “…I could tell the voice was coming from inside this room. It was a male voice, speaking in German.” German? A German had got into the room? “Naturally, I was somewhat alarmed, so I phoned the police.”

“Well, you would, wouldn’t you?” I reassured her. “So, did they find this German man?”

“No, Mr Fry. Because there wasn’t one to find. The police told me to wait for them out the front. They were here within two or three minutes. They came in and I came with them, as I know the combinations for the doors. When we got to that door…” She pointed to the door again. “…we all heard the voice.” This was quite gripping. I hoped Hannah was going to be okay. She continued: “One of the policemen knocked on the door, and the voice said, “Das ist eine tür”: That is a door. Well, I speak conversational German…” She’s very clever. “…That is a door, seemed a strange and obvious thing for someone to say. And then I realised.”

“What?”

“That not only had you left the rabbit behind, but you’d left the fucking computer on, with the speakers turned up.” Ah. And so it would seem that in my frustration, when I’d left the hospital the previous day, I had left the rabbit hooked up with the Babel fish.

“So what happened then?” I asked.

“Well then, I had to say something. The rabbit wasn’t going to come to the door, and I didn’t want the police breaking it down.”

“So you told them about the Babel fish?”

“No, of course I fucking didn’t.” Hannah was very potty-mouthed today. “No, I made a complete arse of myself and told them I must’ve left the radio on.” I’d caused Hannah embarrassment. I was embarrassed. “So, we came in: Myself and two police officers. And that fucking rabbit, was just sitting there, talking German. To the officers, it was a rabbit moving its mouth, like rabbits do; and a voice coming over the speakers: The two weren’t connected. I apologised, cursed myself, and you, and switched the ‘radio’ off. The police took a precautionary look around, then they left.” I felt sorry for Hannah.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you give Charles his little camp here?”

“Yes, I did. Because no-one else was going to feed and water him. Then I phoned you, three times.” The last missed call on my mobile must have been Hannah’s mobile.

“So no-one knows about us? I mean, the Babel fish.”

“No. No-one knows, as it should be.” Was this a setback? In any case, Charles was German. I didn’t speak German and I hadn’t worked out how to translate between human languages. Hannah did speak German but she seemed to want less to do with the whole thing now than she had before. So I was in the room where the Babel fish resided, but I wasn’t going to get far with the rabbit. I was interested in the cats in the waiting room; especially the little tiger. “What is it you’re looking for, Mr Fry?” I was looking out of the window, just generally. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular.

“Erm, nothing,” I said. For once, could I be Doctor Jones’ focus? “Nothing in particular. I mean, unless some sort of answer were to suddenly fly by.” Of course, that would be a metaphor for my life: Suddenly some previously unknown creature flaps past the window, just as I turn my head away. So I kept looking.

“But, I mean, in life. What do you hope to gain from talking with the animals? What about the spaceships we took to the park?”

“Answers, doctor. My work brings me into contact with a lot of people, things and situations. The ships and the Babel fish have made me wonder many more things: Is it all connected? Where did the aliens come from? Are there more of them? What do they want? How long have they been here? And then the Babel fish: Maybe I’ve not been asking the right questions. Perhaps I over-analyse things and maybe some of those animals can simplify things for me. They’re not tarnished by modern human life; They don’t have jobs, don’t have to pay rent; Just make sure the family is fed and they have shelter. Is a life without politics and capitalism a better one for its simplicity, or would the animals make a better job than we did, if they’d evolved to be this planet’s dominant species? I just feel we owe them for all the damage we’ve caused, trampling all over their world, like invaders; Stealing their land, enslaving them, forcing them to rear young for our own consumption, then killing them. These are things which might sit awkwardly with many people if they gave it thought. Most people don’t. I do and I just want to find a simple answer, so that I can tell the rest of the world what it’s about and we can all get along.”

“I can’t answer your questions, Mr Fry. Maybe no-one can. Perhaps you’re right and you’ve not been asking the right questions of the right people, or things. But I don’t know what the right questions are. I suppose they’re the ones to which the answers make sense.” I thought that was quite philosophical. Everything comes down to philosophy in the end.

I realised this might be the last time I saw Hannah: I’d run out of animals to bring her and I couldn’t acquire more. Perhaps it was time to leave the Babel fish and wait to see what developed from my project with Gilbert Giles. That was highly likely to be short-lived, so perhaps I needed to look for answers elsewhere, or just stop questioning. It had been so tantalising to have the spokespersons for the animal kingdom at my disposal, but not to have found one who seemed anything like on-topic. Of course, I hadn’t spoken to any of them yet though: I’d heard them speak; I’d heard them respond to questions from Doctor Jones and their humans; and I’d thought for a second that the mynah bird had read my mind. I just had to speak, or think. And I needed to know what to speak or think about.

It may have been Hannah taking pity on me, but I didn’t ask why she let me stay in the lab that afternoon. I had one last chance, without having to ask for it. The arrangement would be as before: She would consult with her patients and their humans, and I would observe from the corner, using the Babel fish. I switched on the computer, twiddled some knobs, and adjusted the microphone and speaker levels, then I put the headphones on. While I waited for the first patient, I tried the fish out on the rabbit. It was still tuned to ‘Rabbit’ from the last abandoned session.

“…sie ist nett.” What? Hannah was right: Charles’ German accent was quite intimidating. “Ich glaube, sie mag dish.”

Sometimes, something can be right in front of you all the time and you just don’t notice it’s there. Like, if you work with a word processor every day, knowing yourself to be very proficient and sometimes congratulating yourself on your cleverness with the things you can do. Then one day, you discover a function which you’d never noticed before, because you didn’t know what it was. Then it proves to be just the thing you need to make your life a little easier. In my word processor example, it was a means of numbering pages a certain way. With the Babel fish, it was a second ‘Translate’ function. As far as I’d been aware, the drop-down menu contained all of the translation tools: I chose a type of animal, then there were various sub-menus in further drop-down lists, to narrow things down. But even though this was a universal translation program, running on a quantum computer, it still used the Windows operating system. So under ‘File’, was another translation function. At first, I assumed it to be a duplicate of the drop-down menus, but when I clicked on it, I got different sub-menus: Languages. Not animal languages, but national and regional ones. So the drop-down menu translated any animal to human, and now this other one translated human languages. So I selected Rabbit>Human, then German>English. It was so simple, it had been there all the time and I hadn’t noticed.

By now, Hannah’s first patients were being brought in: Duncan the cat and Cow cat. I tuned to Feline>Domestic, wondering if I might need the second translator. But these two were definitely London cats. Without the benefit of the Babel fish, the cats were growling at one another from their respective baskets. As soon as I put the headphones on though, a conversation emerged:

“…you were s’posed to be watchin’ the doors, ya silly car.” This was tabby Duncan to the black and white cat. Interestingly, the secondary translation menu in the Babel fish had ‘Cockney’ under the ‘Dialects’ options. I noticed it had one for Geordie as well. Doctor Hannah Jones herself had designed and built this thing. I set this secondary function to Cockney>English, and Duncan’s voice was still like that of Danny Dyer, but without his London inflections. “…all you had to do was watch the bloody doors,” Duncan continued. “You had one job.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t tell me ‘ow many bloody doors there were, did ya?” This was Cow cat, sounding like Pat Butcher, then like Pam St. Clement when the Cockney was translated to English. “It was a big house.” I wondered what Cockney alley cat mission they’d been on.

The cats both belonged to the young girl, or rather, the cats had a girl. As Hannah read from her clipboard, it transpired that the girl was called Lola, Duncan was Duncan Jones, Cow cat was called Cow cat, and mum was just mum.

“What seems to be the problem with these two then?” Hannah asked Lola.

“I think they were fighting last night. Duncan is limping a bit and Cow cat has been growling a lot. Could you check them over please?”

“Of course. Let’s have a look…” Hannah took Duncan from his basket and Lola opened cow cat’s, who then sat at the entrance.

“Wanker,” said Cow cat, looking at Duncan. “I hope she puts you to sleep.” What had Duncan done to deserve something so harsh?

“Who rattled your basket, you tart?” Duncan was now speaking to Cow cat. Both cats were speaking in growls and I wondered again if this was the sole basis for the Babel fish’s translations, or if it was somehow reading and broadcasting thoughts. The latter scenario could have quite alarming possibilities in a different setting. If, one day, for whatever reason, everyone had an in-built Babel fish, no thoughts would be secret. I could think of at least one scenario where that might work in my favour. “Well, if she puts me to sleep, I hope she doesn’t do it to you. Because then you’ll realise you miss me.” Duncan was quite deep in his thoughts.

“Can’t you tell this woman I’ve twisted my back leg?” Duncan meowed at Lola.

“I think he’s just twisted his leg, at the back,” Lola said to Hannah.

“Well, I can’t see anything else wrong. Let’s have a look.” Hannah squeezed Duncan’s belly to check for any twists or blockages internally, then lifted his back legs off of the table.

“I am not a wheelbarrow,” Duncan protested. “Ow, ya fucker! Yes! There! Cor fuckin’ ‘ell!” The translation seemed a little confused as Duncan squealed.

“Yes,” said Hannah. “You’re right, young doctor: A bit bruised and maybe sprained; nothing broken though.”

“Apart from my heart,” said Duncan, as he walked back into his basket. “Bitch”. He seemed to be addressing the other basket.

“Now, young lady.” Hannah picked up Cow cat. “What have you been up to then?”

“I ain’t bin up to nuffink. It was ‘im.” She nodded at Duncan’s basket. ‘Go rand there, ‘e sed. Watch that bladdy door.’ So, I go and there’s two bladdy doors ain’t there? So I got me bladdy tail shut in one didn’t I?”

“Yes, she’s got a bit of a kink in her tail here,” Hannah pointed out to Lola. “There’s no bite marks though; no broken skin. I think it’s just bruised.”

“Bladdy right it’s bruised. You got some tablets or summink?”

“So I’ll just write a prescription,” Hannah explained to Lola. “It’s just some painkillers. They’ll be fine in a couple of days.”

“‘ear that you old tart?” said Duncan from his basket. “You can stop yer bladdy moanin’”

“Oh, shuddap ya silly sod. I ‘ope they forget to take you ‘ome,” replied Cow cat, now back in her basket. But Lola, mum, Hannah and the two cats left together. I’d have loved to have gone with them, just to listen to the cats some more, and find out exactly what was going on.

I looked at the rabbit again, looking like it wanted to say something. I set the translations for Rabbit>Human and German>English. Charles just looked at me, saying nothing. Perhaps I should prompt him? What would I ask him? I hadn’t begun to process a question, before Hannah returned with a the young lad and the man with the toyger. The little tiger was called Karu, and his human was Louis. Karu was there to be ID chipped and out of the basket, he was a magnificent little animal: The toyger is the product of selectively breeding short-haired tabbies, as far back as the 1980s. The result is a domestic moggie which looks to all intents like a miniature tiger, and Karu seemed as confident as any larger tiger might. The only sound he made was a purr, as the chip was inserted into his neck ruff. I tuned the Babel fish back to Cat>Human:

“Human. Human. Human. Human.” Karu was looking around, so presumably counting the four humans in the room. He paid no attention to Charles. “You need us now, human.” Was he talking to me? “3000 years ago, we needed you. 3000 years from now, we will need you again.” Could this little guy confirm some of our ancient alien theories? Had ancient civilisations helped just cats, or were there cat gods, as depicted in ancient gliphs? Had mankind been put on Earth by extraterrestrial cat people, as some kind of experiment, or for some purpose? There were many wild theories. Why would they need us again? Why did we need them now? “You need us, human. But if you don’t listen, you won’t hear us.” Me, or us? He only spoke in the singular. I was listening, through the headphones.

But Karu said nothing more. His chip implanted, he calmly walked back into his basket and settled in for the ride. He had a bit of the regal in him, like a wealthy man of old, seated in a sedan chair carried by two servants.

And that was to be the end of Doctor Jones’ consultations for the day. When she returned to the lab, she said she needed to go out on field calls. I took this as my cue to leave and took a last look at Charles before unplugging the Babel fish. As always, he looked like he was about to say something, but nothing came. I unplugged the headphones, and the speakers popped, as speakers do when a microphone is unplugged. I turned the speakers down to an acceptable level, ushered Charles into his basket and picked him up. I walked to the consulting table and rested Charles, while I spoke to Hannah:

“Hannah, thank you for putting up with me again.”

“It’s been…” She paused. “It’s been, fascinating Mr Fry.” Fascinating was better than interesting. She was a fascinating woman herself. As I looked at her, all I could think was, ‘I wish you only what’s best for you’.

As Charles and I made our way to the door, I thought I heard a voice:

“I think I’ve fallen in love with you.” It wasn’t Hannah. It wasn’t me. It must have been the Babel fish picking up Charles’ voice. I wondered what Hannah might make of it, if she’d heard it. Sometimes it’s best just not to know something.

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6
Dust

I’ve told myself a billion times not to exaggerate, but my studio was a shit hole: Not untidy or unhygienic, just dusty. But cleaning the studio posed existential risks. If ever there were a perfect excuse for not dusting, there it was: The very existence of many species, and perhaps entire races, was at the mercy of a tin of Mr Muscle furniture polish and a Vileda cloth. What was I to do with such a predicament?

I decided I wouldn’t vacuum but that I’d dust, and I’d keep the dust. That way, I minimised the risk of inadvertently destroying species or races, or being the catalyst for some pan-dimensional sub-atomic Armageddon. The spacecraft I’d found on my typewriter were the size of grains of sand, possibly smaller. I knew that they had the ability to alter their size: The black mamba ship’s captain had spoken of a ‘Restore’ function, when he was mocking the humans in the other space ship. Hannah and I had set the animal ship free.

The human craft had perished in a freak fire, perhaps recorded in their future prehistoric records as an inferno from a sun god. Ancient alien theorists maintain that mankind had contact with extraterrestrials whom they perceived as gods, many millennia ago on Earth. Some encounters were with purely altruistic gods, who passed on knowledge for humanity’s benefit. Others could have been warnings to stay away, to stop. Some of the wilder theories posit that humans are a genetically modified race born of the stars; others that we are an elaborate experiment, or slaves to a cause unknown to us: Parts of a machine, or a computer simulation.

In reality, the destruction of a ship with all hands lost was brought about by a magnifying glass held at an angle in the sun’s rays. They were a bunch of sanctimonious wankers who’d stolen plans from another race to build a ship, only to be inept enough to miss one crucial point: Where they came from, intergalactic travel required shrinking a vessel and its occupants to microscopic size to travel through wormholes, then restoring everything to normal size on the other side. They overlooked this. Although it pained me, I couldn’t help feeling they deserved what they got, if only for evolutionary purposes, or the prevention thereof.

A Pot Noodle tub provided the perfect vessel to transport any populations which might be among my household dust. I’d often wondered what was in those things (not poodle, according to the advertised ingredients). As I cleaned each surface, I pondered what I might be collecting: Warring armadas; the first wave of a race of aliens intent on populating Earth, or seeking refuge, following the defeat of an enemy or fleeing persecution: refugees, pursued by the captors they are escaping. There were many possibilities. But among them was the chance that I was merely dusting away wreckage, carnage, an aftermath: one which might have been prevented if these creatures had been offered asylum sooner, but for my reluctance to clean my studio. Extinction because of one man’s whim. And of course, it could just be dust. Dot and Dash, the original two ships, could have been unique to each of them: Pioneering explorers, neither of which returned; Those they left behind, wondering if their heroes made it. Perhaps they’d come to find out, assuming no news to be good. Or they might have simply given up. The ships could have been lost, not in their stories but in their navigation: Perhaps this wasn’t where they’d wanted to end up. The possibilities multiplied and with them, so did the questions, exponentially.

I might have been pondering aloud at some points. As I dusted around Victoria Wood and Julie Walters, they came out to see what was going on. I suppose you would if your home was being lifted from the ground. They came to the bars and twitched their noses, like mice do. They twitched at me and at one another. Were they talking? To whom? Themselves or me? Either way, they were captive; Imprisoned behind a door which they might not contemplate in the same way as me: A simple one-click mechanism without so much as a lock which they could see. It was simple: obvious to me and right under their noses, yet they couldn’t see it.

Among the preserved detritus in the studio was Charles, my German rabbit: He seemed less bothered about life, wandering around his new world in my studio, and probably not contemplating everything in the same way I was. He just looked like he wanted to tell everything something.

Once I’d gathered most of the dust into the Pot Noodle container, I sat at my typewriter to contemplate what to do next. I pondered spending the rest of the day writing: I had plenty of unfinished projects; mainly research, some fiction and others, factual. I was writing this book after all. I thought about phoning Hannah and just asking her if she fancied meeting up, just as friends. Perhaps we could get another coffee? I had what I thought was her mobile number in any case: I had it saved under ‘Hannah, mobile,’ just above ‘Hannah, work.’ I’d enjoyed our last time together in the park. I’d very much enjoyed my evening out with Gil, and wondered if Hannah might want to know about my other experiment. I really wanted to find out more of what Victoria, Julia and Charles might be saying, or thinking. But I’d taken all of them to the hospital recently, and all had been given a clean bill of health, which wouldn’t have declined in just a few days, unless I’d been neglecting them. Far from it, all of my guests were enjoying the sort of service and food I’d expect if I were in a hotel, if I was them. The excuse I seemed to be looking for was right in front of me: The Pot Noodle pot.

No matter that I was quite well know at Hannah’s place of work by now, I still had to complete a form every time I visited. For ‘Pet type / breed’, I wrote ‘Not poodle’. There were only two other people in the waiting room: A lady and her dog, a West Highland Terrier.

I twirled the pot around in my hands as I sat waiting. It was one of the orangey-brown ones: ‘Original curry’. If what I’d eaten from that pot was how curry originally tasted, I was thankful to our Indian cousins for changing it. But what did that pot, which once held the slag of snacks, contain now? What might we see under the doctor’s microscope, assuming I was allowed to use it? I ticked off the obvious things in my mind: Dust, my hair, dust, Charles’ fur, dust. There may be a turd or two from under Victoria and Julie’s cage. There’d be skin flakes, dust mites, and more dust. In amongst all that other dust, there just might be one or more tiny space ships.

“Mr Fry.” That’s me. Doctor Jones had a voice which could instantly tear me away from my daydreams.

“Yes, Ha… Doc…tor Jones.” I’d almost been over-familiar, but I’d stopped myself and changed tack. But in doing so, I’d just called Doctor Jones ‘Haddock’.

“Come with me please, Mr Fry.” I was being called first, before the lady and the little white Scotsman. As we walked along the corridor to the lab, Hannah continued: “I see you don’t have a poodle, nor anything else that’s living, as far as I can see. So what brings you here this time?”

“Well,” I said. “It’s this Pot Noodle.” Good start. “Or rather, what’s in it.”

“Mr Fry, we are not Food Standards.”

“No,” I agreed. “No, it’s what’s in here now.”

“And what have you caught this time, Mr Fry?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know. It’s dust from my studio.” Then Hannah said one of those things she says:

“What the fuck?” She was very clever, and that potty mouth of hers made her even more attractive. It made me think that I needed to rein in my thoughts if we were to use the Babel fish, given that I suspected it could interpret brain waves.

“Well,” I continued. “Well, you see. The thing is, or the things. You remember those space ships we found?”

“You found those, Mr Fry.”

“Well, yes. But I didn’t know what they were. It was us who made the discovery, together.” I hoped that didn’t sound too dramatic.

“And you suspect that there might be more. So you’ve brought all the dust from your home, to show me at work. So that we can look under the big microscope and see if there are aliens in it.” She really was very clever indeed. “Well, seeing as you’re here.” We were in the lab by now. “I called you first as I thought you’d want to use the fish. I only have one patient to see, but be my guest.” She was very intuitive. One might even think she could read my mind.

I knew what I was expecting, so I twiddled the knobs on the computer and set it to ‘Dog,’ then fine-tuned and waited. The lady looked quite surprised to see me. I wondered what else she might expect: She’d seen me leave the waiting room with Hannah, but not seen me return. Hannah had returned on her own and the corridor led directly to the lab. But the lady still looked surprised to see me there. If I’d not been there, would she have been less surprised, when the only way for me not to be there would be if I’d climbed out of the window?

“Don’t worry about him,” Hannah said to the woman. It was too early for a prognosis on the dog, so I assumed she was talking about me. “So you’re Nettie, and this is Jake.”

“Yes.” I was riveted, so I put the headphones on.

“So what seems to be the problem with Jake?”

“Well, it’s mainly his skin. But he’s been a bit…” The woman paused. “He’s been a bit, well, naughty I suppose.” Well, that helped.

“Och, yee dan’t neigh the haff o’ it, woman.” I was listening to Jake now. I fine-tuned the Babel fish in the languages menu: Glaswegian>English. “I heed a doomp, underrrr yee beed.” The translation took a while to compute. “We need tee geet woors a mawgay, so aa heave a bairrrn to bleem.”: They needed to get a cat, so the dog had someone to blame.

“How do you mean, naughty?” Hannah asked.

“Well,” said Nettie. “He’s been tearing up toys, being fussy about his food, and just a bit down, really.”

“Really?” Hannah repeated. “He’s…” Hannah moved her glasses into that strange position I’d seen before: Sort of at a forty-five degree angle on her face, so that she was only looking through one lens at her notes. “He’s just turned three.”

“Arm fifteen, ya knee?” Dogs apparently do have their own version of years.

“So in dog years, that makes him a teenager,” Hannah continued. “So what you’ve got, is a toddler and an adolescent, all at the same time. Westies can be quite restless and prone to angst anyway. They’re great family dogs but they’re instinctively a working dog, so they want to get out and hunt rodents. Wanting to go out and chase things around? Breaking things in frustration? Sulking? What do those things all have in common?”

“I don’t know.” Nettie still looked confused. I wondered for a moment if me climbing out of the window might actually help.

It really is funny, the things you can see in clouds. Floating in the sky outside were nine clouds in all, of various cloud shapes and sizes, all looking like clouds. But their tranquil appearance could be cover for their inner intent; cloaked ships, like a Vogon constructor fleet, wrapped in candy floss. Douglas Adams said he was lying on top of a haystack, looking up at the sky, when he conceived The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. JK Rowling had a Scottie dog. I wondered if I needed to add a little cloud like Jake to my growing menagerie at home. I wondered if having a dog might help my writing, so that it might be taken more seriously. But that was more fiction.

But if I had a dog, we could go out for walks. If I could talk to the dog, it would be even better: We could talk about things, like the best shape for a stick, or the different sounds the colours of cars make. When you throw a stick for a dog, does it enthusiastically bring it back to you, because it thinks you like throwing sticks? We probably wouldn’t talk much about maths, but there’s a very simple equation for happiness: Happiness is equal to or greater than the events of your life, minus your expectations of how life should be. Surely the happiest person in my household would be the dog, precisely because his or her expectations extend no further than being fed twice a day and going for walks. Open a packet of biscuits, and the dog is winning: He or she aims low, but they pretty much nail it every day as a result.

“Mr Fry?” That’s me. Hannah was talking to me. “Are you okay? You look miles away.” As such, I descended from the clouds and tuned back in to the one on the examination table.

“Yes,” I said. “Just trying not to think aloud.”

“So,” Hannah continued, skewing her glasses again to half look at her notes. “I can see his atopic dermatitis and hyperpigmentation are responding well to treatment.”

“His what?”

“His sensitive skin and red blotches: The cream is working.”

“Oh good.” Nettie looked relieved. “We did think we might have to have him put down at one point.”

“Yee can put me doon noo if yee wanny. On the feckin’ floor.”

“No,” Hannah said, “just think of him as a toddler teenager with acne.”

“Aye. Arm feelin’ a bit doon. Get was hoom, so are keen sit on was lap and yee feed me wharl yee stooff yer cakehole. Put some telly awn, so are keen shoot at it.” I don’t know if the Babel fish was having trouble with the accent and making it sound more like Newcastle, but I’ve tried to transcribe what I heard as accurately as possible. As Nettie, Jake and Hannah left, I was taking off the headphones when I heard one of those curious things: “I just don’t understand.” I unplugged the headphones but left the speakers on. Hannah would want to hear the aliens again, if indeed there were any.

I looked at the Pot Noodle again, then at the clouds outside: Nine had become three, different sized, differently shaped clouds. One was moving toward another just as Hannah walked back in, which was rather splendid timing.

“So,” she said, “not poodle.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Shall we get your toys out?” Perhaps Hannah was taking this toddler / teenager thing to a more patronising level. “Mr Fry?”

“Erm, yes, Ha… Doctor.” Oh, for fuck’s sake.

“Hannah is fine.” I was glad. If Hannah’s okay, that’s okay. “Let’s lay out some paper.”

“Lay out some paper?” What? Why?

“Yes. We’ll lay a load of printer paper down on the floor, then tip your dust onto it. Then we’ll scan over it and look for anything that’s moving.” She was very clever. “You do realise, before we do this,” Hannah said, “those two things from last time, they might be the only ones.”

“But equally, they might not,” I asserted.

“I know, Mr Fry. And I know how much you want this to be. Just don’t get your hopes up mate.” MATE!? MATE? MATE! Did she just call me mate, or did she think it? Or did I imagine it? Some things are best left unknown.

It was like staring at a clear night sky, not knowing where in the world you are or what time it is, scanning and hoping to spot the International Space Station float over: A tiny, white speck, like a little moving star. Our canvas was smaller than the night sky and we were looking for black on white. But just as white chalk on a blackboard is the same as black ink on white paper, this was the same as watching the sky.

“There!” Hannah said, quicker than I’d expected. “And there! Grab a flask.” I handed Hannah a glass beaker and her hand hovered over the white sky, ready to bring down a huge dome on top of whatever was running around down there. Then I noticed one, then another. I started to itch, not mentally but because these little dark dots could be mites or fleas. Whatever they were, they seemed to be waking up. “I think,” Hannah started, “we should just plonk a lump of this stuff into something.” ‘Plonk’, ‘Lump’ and ‘Stuff’ were now scientific terms, used in the process of collecting and extracting subjects for analysis. Pretty soon, we’d plonked a lump of stuff in a Petri dish, treated with the same inert adhesive coating that we’d employed before. When we’d found stuff.

Everything was poised over this plonked lump of stuff: Unbeknown to those below, a hugely powerful telescope was bearing down on them and their every word was being heard. Meanwhile, they were oblivious. Now, Hannah was driving and I was a willing passenger sitting next to her.

The first thing we saw was a dust mite: a gargantuan alien beast at this magnification. Although stuck in the solution, its front end was unimpeded and it appeared to be shovelling things into its face. It was quite an endearing thing actually: Magnified many, many times, it had a face, which gave it personality. It continued to just shovel away; to go about its sole business of shovelling skin cells into its mouth and knowing nothing other than what was in its mind: The shovelling of food. Although there were potentially many more, and even more interesting things to find in this micro universe, I was intrigued to hear what this shovelling machine might be saying or thinking. But the Babel fish didn’t seem to stretch to life which is naturally microscopic in size.

We scanned around the Petri dish with the microscope’s remote controlled camera. Like before, the view on the monitor was as though Hannah was piloting a ship around a giant alien landscape. Except this time, it was more of a junk yard on some distant planet. Individual grains of dust were like boulders, and strands of hair, like massive twisted metal bars. Every now and then, there were more mites, shovelling; and many smaller, worm-like things: bacteria, I assumed. I wasn’t sure if I was excited or apprehensive about the prospects of finding another spacecraft, but I felt relief when we did. But it was a circular ship, like the original Dot, and that had been a human ship. I really, really hoped that we’d find another one like the original Dash: A long ship carrying animals.

We zoomed in on the domed top of the circular ship, to the bridge. There, three men in robes stood around a circular table: Druids around a command console. One of them spoke:

“Reveal yourselves!” Nothing happened. “We are a rescue party. Our brothers came here and didn’t return. We come in peace, to discover their fate.”

“Did you work out the restore function before you left?” It was a rasping voice: It was a snake. Had the original one somehow got back into my studio? This seemed highly improbable, so this must be a different snake. Hannah panned out with the camera. The long ship was parked probably about a centimetre away from the saucer, hidden behind boulders, twisted metal and other debris. Although the distance was less than half an inch, it was vast in relation to the size of the ships. We maintained our position and listened in as the man spoke again:

“Where are you? What is this restore function you speak of?” They clearly hadn’t thought of it. I relaxed, and listened more intently, now that a potential problem was out of the way.

“I can see you, but you can’t see me.”: It was the snake again, with a teasing tone.

“Want to zoom in on him?” Hannah asked.

“Of course,” I said, perhaps slightly too enthusiastically. But one thing puzzled me: “Hannah, how are you able to translate two languages at once? I mean, I’m assuming the men there are speaking in some alien tongue and not English? And although the snakes are clearly an advanced race, I wouldn’t imagine English is their native language?”

“No, you’re right,” Hannah answered. “I just select Auto-detect on the Babel fish. Look, here.” She pointed to the program’s on-screen interface. Sure enough, there was an Auto-detect function in the Options menu, just like Google Translate. It had been there all the time. It would seem that wherever there’s a simple solution to something in plain view, I’ll find a more complicated way of not using it. Hannah zoomed in on the snake’s ship and there he was, sitting (if indeed it’s possible for a snake to sit) in the captain’s seat, speaking into a microphone. He was a black mamba but he was a different one, although apparently with the same personality as the last:

“I’m over here.” Captain Mamba was almost singing now. I should imagine the humans were none the wiser about where here actually was. “Except I won’t be here for long. Because my ship has the restore function, which we left out of our plans because we knew you’d steal them.”

“What is the restore function?” The man sounded angry.

“On my ship, it’s a big, red button, which says ‘RESTORE’ on it, in large, friendly letters. Do you have one, man?”

“No!”

“Well, you’re a bit fucked then, aren’t you?”

“Why!?”

“Oh for Ra’s sake, man. Will you ever evolve?”

Ra was an ancient Egyptian Sun god and the ancient Egyptians worshipped snakes. Based on the last snake captain’s dismissal of man’s God, was it right to suppose that Ra actually existed; that he was worshipped as a god when that’s what the ancient Egyptians would have perceived him as, when in fact he was an alien, who’d visited Earth thousands of years ago? This was certainly one of many foundations of ancient aliens theorists. The snake continued:

“Your trailblazers made the same mistake: In their haste to construct their transport, using plans stolen from us, they didn’t think ahead. They didn’t check things over. Consequently, their ship’s run routine did exactly what it was programmed to do: It shrunk to sub-atomic size, so that it could travel millions of light years through a wormhole. But theirs lacked the part of the run routine which you have also missed: The restore function. A big, red button which restores the crew to normal size. But not the ship. That would give us away somewhat. Without the ship though, we are free to return to normal size at our target destination, so that we can blend in and live freely with the others on this planet. It was always a one-way trip. We understood that. We wanted nothing more, as we were fleeing persecution. You have a return ticket if you’d like to use it.”

“How?” The man seemed lost and impatient, which I supposed he would be.

“You can simply return, through the wormhole. But even if you do, you’re still fucked.”

“Why?” He was growing angry again.

“Because you’ll get home and you’ll still be microscopic in size. Your physical biology changed as soon as your ship launched. With the restore function missing, you’ll still be tiny back on your home planet. No-one will ever know you are there.” This particular branch of mankind, or whatever they were, was indeed a bit screwed. “You can stay here, man. But Ra doesn’t want you here: You are not evolved. You’re not ready to explore. You’re here to invade. Word around the campfire here is that your predecessors were destroyed by a bolt of light from the sun. Ra banished them.” Actually, that was Hannah with a magnifying glass.

“Curse you, snake!” the man shouted. “Curse you and all of your kind.”

“Ah,” said the snake. “Just as we were cursed on Earth, to forever slide around and with no limbs? Well that worked, didn’t it?” I detected sarcasm. “I mean, that really stalled my evolution, didn’t it? Here I sit, limbless. But if your so-called god really had cursed my kind, wouldn’t he have thought to do something about my mouth?”

“This guy certainly has a mouth,” said Hannah.

“One bite from me, man, and you’d be dead after a few long, agonising hours. And you’d probably beg me to kill you. And if I had hands to hold a gun with, I’d probably do the decent thing. But I don’t have hands, you see? So I can’t put you out of your misery. So I put it to you, that if there even was a god; the one you believe in, he was pretty shit when it came to thinking up curses, wasn’t he?”

“He’s got him there,” I said.

“Yeah, this one’s maybe more of a bad ass dude than the last one.” Hannah concurred.

“Another thing, man.” The snake captain spoke again. “Can your ship do this?” As we looked to see what that might be, the long ship started to move.

“How can it do that?” I asked. “How can they move through the adhesive?”

“They’ve obviously found a way, Mr Fry. They’ve seen a problem and set about solving it. And they have. They’re adaptive.”

“What?” Said the man in the saucer. “Can my ship do what? I can’t see you.”

“You will in a minute, man.” The snake’s ship then travelled slowly, submarine-like, around the barrier of debris it had been concealed behind. But then something else happened: A smaller craft; much smaller, emerged from the stern of the long ship. Then another, and another. Three smaller ships now lined up alongside the larger one. Then it got stranger still, as the three smaller ships grew. Eventually, they were exactly the same size as the mother ship they’d emerged from.

“What the?” I started.

“Well, their ability to change size, I assume,” Hannah offered. “It’s obviously scalable, so that one of these big ships here can carry others which are even smaller. And those others can then restore to a point. To be honest Mr Fry, I’m as intrigued as you are.”

“So,” I wondered, “could this mean they could re-grow their ships to whatever their original pre-departure size was?”

“Given what we’re seeing, I wouldn’t rule it out. But as Mr Snake here said, they don’t. I can see where he’s coming from and it’s a perfect model.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he said this is a one-way trip; that they’re fleeing their home planet. They’re not invading; they just need a new home which they can slip into unnoticed. If you think about it, it’s pretty much a perfect plan.” And put like that, it was. In fact, the only people who knew they were on Earth were Hannah and me.

By now, the four long ships were lined up in front of the saucer ship. This was all starting to look a bit unfortunate for the stranded men. Then the snake rasped again:

“You have a choice, man,” said the mamba captain. Looking at him on the screen, his mouth movements were quite unsubtle: an exaggerated opening and closing, like he was chewing invisible food, far too big for his mouth. If we didn’t have the Babel fish and we were relying on lip-reading alone, he could quite easily have been saying something like, ‘Blah, blah, blah, blah…’.

“What choice, serpent?” The man was growing annoyed again. If I were him, I’d try to keep it together.

“Watch your mouth, man. Be careful what you say with that un-evolved, fat tongue of yours. I can help you, man.”

“You speak with forked tongue, snake!”

“Well, of course I fucking do. I’m a snake.”

“Sorry,” Hannah said, as she covered her mouth. “This mamba guy is awesome.” I concurred.

“You can help us?” The man asked. “How would I know we’d be safe on your ship?”

“Who said you were getting on my ship?” The mamba rasped.

“You said you’d help us. I assume you’d let us restore to full size using your ship.”

“Why would I want to do that? To introduce an invasive species to this planet which we are at pains to inhabit with no noticeable effect on our new host; In fact, to aid a symbiotic process with this planet, which needs it’s wildlife replenished?”

“We wouldn’t be invasive. There are only three of us. I promise you.”

“No!” If a snake could bark, it would probably sound just like our black mamba shouting ‘No!‘ “No, man. You can stay here, or you can go.”

“But if we go, we’re destined to spend the rest of our lives at this microscopic size.”

“Yes, I know. Good, isn’t it?” I thought I noticed the snake smile. “And if you stay, you’re still stuck at that size, and stuck in this viscous substance we’re immersed in. And you’ve not worked out how to move around in it. So like I said, you’re a bit fucked really, aren’t you? But I can help you.”

“How?”

“By putting you out of your misery, man. I have four battle cruisers with their guns trained on you. It will be quick, I promise. Much quicker than me coming over there and biting you.”

“No!” The man was pleading. He really was stuck with a choice of bad situations.

“Very well,” said the snake, “we’ll just leave you here.” And they did. The four long ships turned about and moved away from the saucer ship. There were cries for help from the men. “Can’t hear you,” said the snake. “Your supposed god’s alleged curse, took away our ears. He was a good guy, this invention of yours. He made sure we didn’t have to listen to your fucking whining.” This snake was very potty-mouthed. I always knew black mambas had attitude; Now I was seeing it personified, so that I could fully appreciate the level of attitude mambas actually have.

Eventually, the four battle cruisers stopped behind some more debris and the radio transmissions ceased.

“That was dramatic.” I offered.

“Yes,” said Hannah, “and surprising. Shall we see what’s in these four ships?”

All four were identical on the outside, to each other and to the original long ship: The one I’d named Dash and which we’d set free in Mountsfield Park, presumably to continue its journey around the planet, dropping various occupants off as they went.

The first we looked at was similar inside to Dash: It had three decks, with the middle one full of foliage and flora, among which various animals were living: We saw apes and monkeys, rodents and mammals, just as you’d expect to see in such an environment on Earth. On the bottom deck was the artificial ocean, where we could see dolphins, the odd shark, various other fish, and coral. These were ecosystems in microcosm.

The second ship was similarly divided but the middle deck was sandy desert. And these ships at full size would have been vast: The desert deck was so deep that it wasn’t entirely surprising to see birds of prey flying above the dunes. In and around the sand and the cacti, we occasionally caught a glimpse of a lizard or snake. In the ocean deck of this ship, there were mainly marine mammals: More dolphins, seals and sea lions; even whales: They were very big ships. And whoever had designed these arks was clearly very technically advanced: The various species in the water would have different needs, and although these trips were apparently brief, those needs would have to be catered for in things like temperature. With seas as big as the ones on the ships, I imagined they must have different temperature zones. In any case, these leviathans were technological wonders.

The theme was continued with the third ship, which carried an ocean on the bottom deck, beneath thick ice on the middle one. Here, polar bears, penguins and Arctic foxes roamed. Beneath them, an arctic ocean environment. I wondered how Gilbert Giles was doing with making copies of me, because I couldn’t process all of this alone.

The fourth ship was different: It still had three decks but the middle and lower ones weren’t ecosystems. Instead, the decks were lined with huge wooden crates, each the size of a small house. If one were to walk on the decks, each would be the size of a large town, home to a few thousand of these wooden box houses. And yet, each of these cruisers, transport ships, or whatever they were, were the size of a grain of rice, at most.

I didn’t know what to say first. I mean, this whole episode had thrown up so many things: Some were ones we suspected but most, we’d neither suspected nor expected. I knew how rabbits feel: All rabbits; all the time. This was the literary equivalent of being startled in headlights. So I said the one thing which occurred to me: In my simple but complicated way of thinking about things, it seemed the best question to ask. It was a question which would give rise to many more, thereby complicating the situation. But those questions needed addressing too. And there was only one person I could pose this initial question to, because she was the only other person on the planet who knew about this. She wouldn’t be able to keep this to herself, any more than I could.

“Hannah: Would you like to get a drink with me?”

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7
Simon Fry 2.0

Happy people make shit activists: They lack the restlessness which drives change. A world full of them would be a passive and complicit place. Temporarily at least, I was happy. But what to do with our discovery? The happiness would pass but I was due to meet the only person I could talk to about the aliens, the talking animals, and about life, the universe and everything.

We were due to meet in The Station Hotel, where I’d dined with Gil two days previously. I wondered if I should tell Hannah about my other project, to see what she thought. But we had plenty to talk about already. So I figured, let’s just see how we go.

Hannah looked very different out of her lab coat: It wasn’t just that she wasn’t wearing her white coat when she arrived; it was her whole demeanour: More relaxed, perhaps more friendly and less professional. Hannah had never been intimidating, but in her own clothes, she looked warmer. In any case, it was a nice juxtaposition to see her in a different context. It actually took me a second to process that it was her, exactly because she was out of context; Like going to the bank every day and seeing the same cashier, then seeing that person out shopping and not recognising them, because they don’t have a window in front of them.

“Simon.” That’s me. That’s my first name. “Simon?”

“Oh! Er, yes, Ha…” Oh God. “…Doc”. Oh for fuck sake. “Hannah, hi. How are you?”

“I’m fine. You okay?” I was.

“Yes, likewise. Thanks. Er, could I get you a, erm…”

“Translator?” Hannah cocked her glasses in that way she does when she’s reading something: She was surveying the beer taps on the bar. “Scrumpy and black please.” This told me a lot and negated the need for a potentially awkward question.

“Two pints of that, please,” I said to the barman.

Not wishing to clutter the bar, I suggested we take a seat at a table, like the kind people eat food on. I had an agenda.

“Hannah, I’ve prepared a list,” I started.

“You’ve done what?”

“It’s just a little prompt list really, to remind me. You see, I just have so many thoughts and questions.”

“So you’re going to interview me. Again?” Hannah looked over her glasses that time. Her glasses were a part of her, giving her a far greater facial expression range: They enhanced her.

I’m not in the habit of describing people’s looks or attire when I write, because such things are subjective: Some would say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But for a moment, I was struck by Hannah. Perhaps it was simply because she was out of work. Maybe she just took off her white coat before leaving the hospital and was wearing her normal clothes underneath. She was smart and cool: A white shirt under a black suit jacket, with a black T-shirt under-layer; Tight black jeans, and zip-up boots with about a two inch heel, making her the same height as me. She had a white hankie in her breast pocket, and her black-rimmed Vic Reeves / Ronnie Barker glasses completed the monochrome. The only deviation from two tone was her red hair and pale pink complexion. I was wearing a dark tweed cloth cap, which I couldn’t help thinking my companion would carry better. For the sake of continuity, I was also wearing black jeans and trainers; I’d thrown a black denim jacket over a geeky T-shit: ‘USCSS Nostromo’: In my own universe, I’d been a crew member on the commercial towing ship in Ridley Scott’s Alien. I only include all of this for the purpose of recording facts, which may be taken as such, or which I can excuse as my own imagination in telling this story as a work of fiction. In any case, I was in my story. This Hannah thing was just one of those details: It had been there up until now, but now it was striking. But despite all the obvious differences between Doctor Jones at the hospital, and Hannah sitting opposite me now, there was something else: There was something different about her and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. “Simon?” Fact or fiction, that is my name.

“Yes, sorry. I was just thinking.” About so many things on my list.

“Shall we just go through your shopping list?” My shopping list: The things I wanted.

“Right, yes. Where shall I start?”

“From the top?”

“Oh, yes. So, Hannah…”

“Simon?”

“Hmm?”

“Shouldn’t this be less scripted?”

“Yes, sorry. I’m more used to reading than talking to people.” It was perhaps a truism: I felt more comfortable with a book in front of my face than an attractive young lady. “Despite having it all written down, I don’t know where to start.”

“Why don’t we start from the end and work back?” Hannah said. And actually, that struck me as a good idea. “So, what the fuck did we see earlier?” She was just as potty-mouthed out of work. This was a comforting constant. And actually, the last thing on my list, was ‘Ask Hannah out’, meaning ‘Talk to Hannah about all of this.’ So the end of that list was now the beginning of this part of the story.

“Well,” I said. “If we take it at face value, we just saw two alien races in conflict: Human-types and animals. The human-types are missionaries, spreading the word of some god they believe in. I don’t like them, for many reasons. Somewhere on a very long list of things I don’t like about them, is their apparent absence of any gender equality.”

“They might be asexual?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them. They seem more chauvinistic to me though. In any case, I don’t like them.”

“Ditto.”

“They seem selfish and self-serving. Anyway, I like Captain Mamba.”

“He, or they, are certainly fascinating characters.” Hannah made me think of nice things, when she just said certain words: ‘Ditto’ reminded me of Patrick Swayze in Ghost; and ‘Fascinating,’ of Mr Spock.

“Yes,” I agreed. “In some ways, strangely endearing. And they seem entirely benign. If we take what they say as read, they’re fleeing persecution on their own planet and seeking refuge on another: Ours. They’re subtle, shrinking to microscopic proportions, perhaps so as not to cause hysteria. Once restored to full size – and the animals, not the ships is a nice touch – they’re just able to blend in. It seems they might have done some research on our planet too: Didn’t Captain Mamba say something about restocking our endangered species?”

“He did.”

“There is one thing which occurs to me: We could hear and understand them thanks to the Babel fish. But they were talking to each other. Do they just have universal translators, or do animals really speak where they’re from? What happens when they’re back to full size? We have no real way of stopping them, and neither would I want to. It could just be that this will change life on Earth fundamentally, on all sorts of levels.”

“We could end up with talking animals roaming the earth, you mean?”

“Yes. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Although it could cause all sorts of problems. I don’t mean talking animals, but how humans might perceive them: Would we want to experiment on them? Or would the fact that they could talk to us mean we wouldn’t need to, when they could tell us all we need to know?”

“You’d hope it would be a nice problem to have,” Hannah said. “Maybe they’d know when to keep quiet. As far as they’re concerned, no-one here knows they can talk, if indeed they can; If we can understand them without the Babel fish, I mean. You and I know, but they don’t know that we know, if you see what I mean.”

“It remains paradoxical. It could be interesting.” It could be all sorts of things.

“Only time will tell,” Hannah offered.

“Well yes,” I agreed. “Quite literally. We’ll have to wait and see, Hannah.”

“We will Simon.” I liked it when Hannah said, ‘we’. Let’s see how we go.

We’d finished our drinks, so Hannah suggested we get another, as we had much to discuss. We had.

“So,” Hannah said as she sat back down with our drinks: Two more pints of scrumpy cider and blackcurrant. “Unless the human-types work out the restore function, we can pretty much discount them.”

“They might even give up now,” I ventured.

“We can live in hope,” Hannah agreed. “So now we just have the animal aliens.”

“Hannah,” I said. I looked around the room, moved my chair in to the table, and leaned over to speak more quietly. “Don’t you think we should be careful what we say? I mean, in public?”

“Really? Simon, we could be talking about a sci-fi film. Or a book. No-one would think this is all for real.” She had a point, but I left my chair where it was anyway. “So anyway,” she went on, “about the animals. There doesn’t seem to be any reason to intervene.”

“None at all.” I agreed. “If it wasn’t for the random sequence of events which found me at your surgery with those things, we wouldn’t even know. I mean, they might have been coming here for centuries, totally unknown to us; to mankind, I mean. They seem to have nothing but good intentions and pose no threat whatsoever.”

“It does make your other question relevant again, Simon: Do they speak to each other where they come from? If they have in fact been coming to Earth for ages, why haven’t we heard Earth animals speaking? I realise that’s a rhetorical question with many theoretical answers. But whatever the reason, I think it’s best that way.”

“I agree Hannah. I actually dread to think what might happen to one of those animals if it fell into the hands of science.”

“Well, it kind of has Simon.”

“Well, I know. But you know what I mean: Experiments and so forth.”

“So now I imagine you’d agree it’s a good idea to keep it to ourselves. I know we could both stand to gain a lot by going public, but I don’t think we should.” I couldn’t help but agree.

“Hannah, I’m a fiction writer by trade. I can still write about all of this, but I’ll do so with fiction. As you just said, no-one would believe any of this stuff is real anyway.” Fiction or not, now was as good a place as any to speculate on what might happen next. “So it’s a logical next step, to set the four animal ships we left in the lab, free. Presumably, they’ll then fly around, dropping various people off to restore themselves. I do wonder if mankind’s conservation efforts are only part of the reason certain animals have been saved from extinction. Perhaps the animal ships have been arriving all along, topping up animals where they need to; all the time, without us realising; right under our noses.”

“I doesn’t really matter though, does it Simon?”

“Absolutely not,” I agreed. “If that has been going on, us Earth humans wouldn’t know: The animals’ shrink-hyperspace-restore system is perfect. And neither should we know, present company excepted of course. Just let mankind keep congratulating itself, for being a partner in it all. Of course, this is all speculative, so I wonder, what next?”

“I’d suggest more cider.” Hannah was a thug.

“Splendid behaviour,” I concurred, and made my way to the bar. Just as I’d sat back down, Hannah did one of those unexpected things:

“Cheers.” Hannah raised her glass and smiled, either at someone standing just behind me, or at me. I looked behind me, and there was no-one there. So I picked up my drink, we clinked and we drank a toast, to something.

“So, Hannah,” I didn’t actually know what I was going to say next. I thought ‘So, Hannah,’ would give me time to think, but it didn’t work. There was still so much on my mind, I didn’t know where to start. I figured it was as good a time as any to tell Hannah about Gilbert Giles. How to start on that? ‘There’s a man I know…’; ‘I met a man…’; “Have you heard of a man called Gilbert Giles?” I doubted Hannah had.

“No.” I was right.

“Well, he’s a microbiologist in Norway, but he has a few sidelines. One is, during tourist season, he takes guided boat tours around the Norwegian coast.” I paused. “He’s a fjord escort, you see?” Hannah did another strange thing: She spat her drink back into her glass.

“Oh, fucking hell.”

“Yes,” I continued, “he’s also researching cloning. He’s hoping he can replenish some of the food chain. But so as not to upset any ethics committees, he’s working with frozen organisms from beneath the Norwegian ice. So in effect, no-one will notice what he’s doing. It’s all very covert and exciting. Almost as perfect a stealth model as the alien animals’.”

“And where do you come into this? How did you meet this Gilbert?”

“Just through research. I do a lot of that, especially for the fiction I write. Even though it’s fiction, it has to be at least plausible, so when I’m writing something sciencey, I research the science.”

“So what was he doing that interested you?”

“Well, he wasn’t, but he is now, kind of thing. If you see what I mean.”

“Er, no.” Hannah could speak and express a subtext, perhaps better than I could write one. Two words, her face, and the position of her spectacles, could speak volumes. But now she looked slightly blank. What thoughts might be evolving behind those black-rimmed windows? Any which might be taking shape continued to do so, as she said nothing at all. I felt I should elaborate:

“Well, you see.” Could she see? I looked behind me again, at where she might be looking, but there was no-one there. I turned back around and leaned in on the table, somewhat conspiratorially and intriguingly, I thought. “You see, I had this other idea…”

“Oh God.” I looked behind me again.

“You see,” I continued, “I thought of another way we might find answers to all the questions we all ask: Scientists.”

“Normally a good place to start, granted. And?” Hannah’s left eyebrow started to climb away from the window.

“Well, obviously there are lots of fields for scientists.” And that gave me another thought: “Actually, imagine if all those animals really could talk. Some would perhaps be more learned than others. It might be that you could have a herd of cattle, all with doctorates, just wandering around, grazing, having a nice day and being a field of scientists.” I was digressing. “But I digress. Well, the underlying issue with matters of life, the universe and everything, is, which questions to ask, so that one may understand the answer. Then I thought, but it would also depend on whom you asked the question of.”

“Well, of course.” Hannah’s eyebrow had moved back down. “But what would you ask Gilbert?”

“Aha!” I looked around to make sure no-one was within earshot. “No, you see, it’s more subtle than that. It requires further research and experimentation. Even then, we don’t know if it’ll work.”

“Subtle sounds like unnecessarily complicated, Simon.”

“Ah, but it’s not, see. Or rather, it needs to be that way so as not to alert anyone. Very covert.”

“And what are you planning to do, covertly?”

“Well, yes. Not directly, but to see whether it could be done. Without anyone realising. Have you seen Jurassic Park, Hannah?”

“Yes, I have.” She shook her head slightly, and smiled just a barely discernible, almost reluctant smile. “And I am so fucking intrigued…” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, as if to stifle something. “…to find out what the fuck you’re going to come up with next. You’d better get me another drink.” Behind Hannah’s glasses, her eyes asked questions. Below her spectacles, and underneath her nose, her mouth seemed to grow more potty, perhaps from the alcohol. I had another thought while I was at the bar.

“Hannah, I just thought of something,” I said, as I returned with our drinks. “Imagine if Mountsfield Park was like Jurassic Park. I mean, it could be: We don’t know what animals the alien ones might bring back. What if some of those crates in the cargo ship we saw, contained dinosaurs. What if we released that ship in Mountsfield Park, like we did the first one? And what if they decided, as soon as we released them, that Mountsfield Park in Lewisham was an ideal habitat for some dinosaurs? Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“Oh my fucking God.” Potty-mouthed, blasphemous; Perhaps atheist: What a sweetheart hooligan Hannah was. “There’s a slight plot flaw in that one, Simon: People might notice.”

“Well, of course. And fiction needs to be plausible. In any case, the animals’ strategy, as far as we’ve observed, would avoid such a thing. If they were dropping off dinosaurs somewhere, they’d choose somewhere remote, like a deep, dense forest or something. Of course, that throws up all sorts of other possibilities. Including, but not limited to, dinosaurs being in Earth’s impenetrable habitats, all along. And deforestation could be making animals extinct which we don’t even know about.” And of course, there might be something, or someone, who I could really talk to about all this stuff. Someone hidden somewhere, hopefully not extinct.

“Well, that is an almost undeniable fact, Simon. Dinosaurs though? Well, you’re the writer, Mr Fry.”

“Well, I like to think so, Doctor Jones. It’s plausible though?”

“I can’t deny that, Simon. But you were saying about scientists?”

“Oh yes.” I was. I’d digressed. “So, what if we could ask one of the greatest minds ever to have lived, what the answers are?”

“It depends who you’d ask and what you’d ask them.”

“As we said earlier.” I agreed. “So what if, we could ask someone, who in their own time didn’t have access to all of the information we now have in the twenty first century?”

“Ask what? Ask who?”

“Well, you see, I haven’t got those two worked out just yet. But theoretically, imagine if we could ask someone like Albert Einstein what he makes of things? You know, if we sat him in front of a computer, or let him watch TV, or some DVDs?”

“He’d have a lot to say. And probably a lot to ask.” As Hannah’s glass rose to her face, so her eyebrows both ascended. It was as though her drink was attached to them. She took a quite impressive gulp of cider as she looked at me down the barrel of the glass, over her spectacles.

“Well, yes. He’d love Google. And lots of technology.” He’d go shit street on the Babel fish, but it was out of respect for Hannah’s wish to not become emotionally involved with animals, that I’d pursued my other line of inquiry. Complete fiction of course, but for a moment, I imagined Einstein sitting in Hannah’s lab, with the headphones on, listening in; Perhaps with me sitting next to him, showing him how all the knobs twiddle things. So many questions, none perhaps with an answer. Like having thought you were in love, many times over; but for different reasons, never finding the one answer. I suppose the question in those circumstances was best asked of myself: Do I want to spend the rest of this life with you? “But it’s all fiction of course, Hannah.”

“Okay.” Hannah took another respectable amount of cider. “But you’re not going to find Albert Einstein preserved in amber.” I could tell she wasn’t taking this seriously.

“No,” I said. But his brain is preserved.

“Securely.”

“But all anyone would need is just one strand of preserved DNA and theoretically, it would be possible to clone and resurrect him.”

“Albert Einstein.”

“Yes, him. Or anyone.”

“Simon,” Hannah said.

“Hannah,” I said.

“Simon, I’m assuming that even you are not actually proposing this?”

“Well, no. Like other poorly thought out plans, that one would be too obvious. I couldn’t really get away with doing a weekly shop with Albert Einstein: I’d be noticed. No, my idea is more subtle. May I?” I hoped that Hannah understood the question, ‘May I?’ as it was intended: A request to take the floor and have the opportunity to explain something, without interruption but with questions at the end.

“Please do,” she said, making a gesture with her hand, as though she was offering something to me in her palm. If there hadn’t been a table, it was a gesture for me to take the floor; In this case, the table.

“As I said,” I started. “Mine is a plan, an idea. It requires research. It all boils down to two things, which I’ve connected: Gilbert’s project to clone extinct species to improve the planet; And the polar opposite: Human extinction. If Gilbert is successful, he could be a saviour of the planet. But what he’s doing is controversial: Cloning. But not in the way he’s doing it: Quietly, with creatures no-one really knows exist, so won’t know if they pop up again; the repair of the planet being a handy upshot. But what if mankind is ever threatened with extinction? You see, Gilbert’s experiments with cloning would cause a stir if they were conducted on more complex life forms: There’s a high mortality rate and lots of parameters which change with each level of complexity. Essentially, he’s looking for a God gene in a subject; an organism which survives the rigours of a cloning process. But if he can identify that in just one subject, then transfer it into the DNA of another, he’s given the recipe of life to a species, and future generations will pass on that genome. What if such a God gene or survival code was somehow embedded in human DNA? All humans, or a rare defect, which has never caused us any bother because it’s benign, but doing good, right under our noses, without us even knowing? It’s almost impossible, but it’s plausible. It warrants questioning and looking into. But of course, human cloning is way out of any playing field as we stand. But what if something suddenly happened, which threatened the very existence of the human race? Or if we understood that such a threat might be real? I question whether a species should survive under certain circumstances; be allowed to, but I do feel attached to my own kind. So if that survival gene is hidden, somewhere deep in the human genome, but it’s unethical and immoral to conduct the science, we’d normally turn to guinea pigs, rats, or mice. But they’re not human. Their DNA is different. Not much, but enough. We could employ ever darker methods and means of research. I didn’t like that idea. So I’m a guinea pig. There you go. I said it.” And I had…

“Wait. So you have volunteered to be cloned?”

“Yes.”

“You do realise, you’re not just going to be able to make a full-size replica of yourself, just as you wouldn’t Einstein. You have thought that through I presume? When you said you might be noticed walking around Lewisham with Albert Einstein, you wouldn’t. Not for several years anyway. And that’s all assuming it fucking worked, which I very much doubt.”

“Yes, well. I’ve thought about it, but not fully thought it through yet. I mean, the chances are so small, the odds stacked against us so strongly, that we’ve not even thought about how things might progress, if we got to the stage where we had a successful clone. The Einstein thing was just the pipe dream that started it all. What we’re looking for is some kind of survival gene, hopefully in my DNA. Hopefully in everyone’s. But to find it, we need a willing volunteer. And that’s me. I accept that possibly thousands of potential mes will perish but if just one of me starts to grow, then we can identify what it is in that one which causes the growth, isolate it and use it in the future, should we need to. Chances are, we won’t. Chances are, the whole experiment won’t work. But if it does, then we can take our results to the appropriate authorities and share them, for the greater good. It’s very subtle, you see?”

“Simon, I have to assume certain things: That you, or Gilbert are acting ethically; That the only ethical code being broken is the use of real human DNA but that it’s yours and you’re a willing participant. How do you know that Gilbert’s intentions are purely benign?”

“Some things have to be taken on trust, Hannah. But what’s the worst he could do? Manufacture an army of mes? It’s impractical. No, we’re just looking for the one clone of me which survives, so that we can find out how it did that.”

“You do know that you’re talking about microscopic things? I mean, any growth will only be apparent under a microscope. It’s not going to grow in front of your eyes. And you do know that a human embryo needs a host?”

“Well, yes. But if a clone is successful, we’ll know long before then. It’s immoral, unethical and illegal to grow a human embryo for longer than 13 days, but we’ll know long before then if the cloning was successful. It’s a one per cent in one per cent chance though, so such details aren’t particularly bothersome.”

“Is this not perhaps a bit of a vanity project then, Simon?”

“I hadn’t thought of that Hannah, so I can honestly answer no.” Now she came to mention it though, I suppose it was a personal survival instinct prompting me; a quest for immortality, no matter how improbable. But I could also save the human race, should it come to that. Then I’d be of value. I’d have a use and a purpose, for many people and not just one.

“So what happens now?” Hannah asked. We were back to there.

“What’s happening now, is that Gilbert is back in Norway. He’s putting my DNA into donor eggs. Now, I do know that human cloning isn’t a thing yet, because it’s such a numbers game. But the eggs are ethically harvested and I’m a willing donor.”

“And it probably won’t work.”

“It probably won’t.” I agreed. “And I don’t even know Gilbert’s sample size. It could be tens or hundreds. The first I’ll know, is a copy of me starts to grow in my studio.”

“You what?”

“Well, Gilbert was only willing to be involved up to a point. He said he’d do all the sciencey bit for me, then the rest was up to me. He’s going to keep a quantity of the potential clones, but he’s said that he’ll not study them; That after 13 days, he’ll destroy them. But he’s sending a sample to me. If my sample does anything in those first 13 days, I’ll contact Gilbert and he’ll look at his control group. He said he would only do that in the unlikely event that I witness growth. If the experiment is a failure, he wants nothing further to do with it. But if it looks promising, that’s why he’s agreed to do it. He knows as I do, that the chances are slim, but if it works, it could be very important.”

“And how do you plan on conducting your studies, Simon? At a microscopic level?”

“Well, I’d need a microscope, Hannah.” We’d had four or five pints of scrumpy cider by then. “Actually, I was going to ask you about that.”

“Oh, fucking hell.”

At that very moment, 700-odd miles away, there could conceivably be a new Nordic version of me coming to life: Simon Fry 2.0. But it was very unlikely…

© Steve Laker, 2017.

“If this all sounds a bit weird, that is, because it is. But it all somehow works, and knits together in the manner of surrealist writers like Julio Cortazar and Otrova Gomas, with a substantial nod, of course, to Douglas Adams, who can make the impossibly strange seem mundane and ordinary. Steve Laker pulls this extraordinary juggling act off admirably well, producing a very good, thought-provoking, page-turning, and also at times darkly comic read.” (Review by Stephen Hernandez, a translator and interpreter).

So that’s how it starts, and that’s the kind of book it is. That’s the first seven chapters, what an agent might read as 50 pages of A4, and which is the first 140 pages of the book. There are 17 more chapters to go, over another 272 pages: The middle and end of the story (Acts 2 and 3). Every copy of the book bought on the strength of this excerpt will be an informed purchase, and I guarantee a satisfying (albeit perhaps unexpected) ending.

Cyrus song is available now in eBook and paperback.
ISBN: 978-15482501-19

The short and simple dog’s life

ANIMALS

I’ve long thought of animals as people, reasoning that humans are animals too, just a different species with more entitled rights. I believe that if we could talk with the animals, humankind might stand a better chance of saving the one home we all share. We might need to think less but more deeply. We may need to regress to a childhood, where we might ask why dogs have shorter lives than us, and be able to answer the question unlike any adult. It’s why I wrote Cyrus Song.

The book notes how dogs make for terrible activists, because they’re generally contented people, with low expectations in life. Once he’s had some biscuits and a decent run in the park, a dog’s pretty much nailed his day. Humans no more understand their ultimate goal than a dog knows how to drive a car he’s chasing.

Many animals pass through the veterinary lab of Doctor Hannah Jones in the book, including dogs, and one – Frank – provides an insight into the canine mind as he gains his wings. In my book, animals in individual homes are not pets, they’re part of the family, and there’s much we can learn from them.

While clicking idly around the internet, I happened upon an anecdote from a veterinarian of many years, struck by the wisdom of a child. Dogs can teach us a lot, and so can children, before they’re conditioned as adults.

Being a veterinarian, I had been called to examine a ten-year-old Irish Wolfhound named Belker. The dog’s owners, Ron, his wife Lisa, and their little boy Shane (aged six), were all very attached to Belker, and they were hoping for a miracle.

I examined Belker and found he was dying of cancer. I told the family we couldn’t do anything for Belker, and offered to perform the euthanasia procedure for the old dog in their home.

As we made arrangements, Ron and Lisa told me they thought it would be good for six-year-old Shane to observe the procedure. They felt as though Shane might learn something from the experience.

The next day, I felt the familiar catch in my throat as Belker‘s family surrounded him. Shane seemed so calm, petting the old dog for the last time, that I wondered if he understood what was going on. Within a few minutes, Belker slipped peacefully away.

The little boy seemed to accept Belker’s transition without any difficulty or confusion. We sat together for a while after Belker’s Death, wondering aloud about the sad fact that dogs’ lives are shorter than human lives. Shane, who had been listening quietly, piped up, ”I know why.”

Startled, we all turned to him. What came out of his mouth next stunned me. I’d never heard a more comforting explanation. It has changed the way I try and live.

He said, ”People are born so that they can learn how to live a good life — like loving everybody all the time and being nice, right?” The six-year-old continued,

”Well, dogs already know how to do that, so they don’t have to stay for as long as we do.”

Live simply.
Love generously.
Care deeply.
Speak kindly.

Remember, if a dog was the teacher you would learn things like:

• When your loved ones come home, always run to greet them.
• Never pass up the opportunity to go for a joyride.
• Allow the experience of fresh air and the wind in your face to be pure Ecstasy.
• Take naps.
• Stretch before rising.
• Run, romp, and play daily.
• Thrive on attention and let people touch you.
• Avoid biting when a simple growl will do.
• On warm days, stop to lie on your back on the grass.
• On hot days, drink lots of water and lie under a shady tree.
• When you’re happy, dance around and wag your entire body.
• Delight in the simple joy of a long walk.
• Be faithful.
• Never pretend to be something you’re not.
• If what you want lies buried, dig until you find it.
• When someone is having a bad day, be silent, sit close by, and nuzzle them gently.

That’s the secret of happiness that we can learn from a good dog.

I was struck by its simplicity, and it blew some sand in my eyes.

Animals in captivity are a human construct, and we give them too little credit for the empathy they have towards us. They’re grateful of our care, even though it was us who destroyed many of their homes and orphaned them (as the London Zoo chapters of Cyrus Song explain). We should question why they even tolerate us, when we’re such a plague on the one planet we all share. Science fiction writers have speculated that they might rise up against us. I’m more drawn to a post-human world where the planet becomes toxic to humans (which we’re doing a very good job of ourselves, but nature will prevail once we’re gone). Perhaps they pity us. Maybe our children will hear them.

Sometimes we over-complicate our lives (as adults at least). We’re conditioned by media and commerce to live a material existence, so we can compete with others. We lost touch with the simple things. It’s the human condition. We will have to live very differently, and return much of the planet to nature, if our home is to survive.

Cyrus Song proposed that while humans were floating blindly towards an extinction legacy, the animals concentrated on the important things, like shelter and food, and telepathy. They were here first, they have a greater collective wisdom than humans, and a closer fundamental connection to earth. They have a future, and there must be more they could tell us if we listen. Our survival strategy needs to be short and simple. We need to hear the Cyrus Song itself, the sounds all around us, beyond human nature.

Cyrus Song is available now as a paperback and eBook.

For the sake of times gone by

THE WRITER’S LIFE

At a time of year when I see friends on Facebook posting their year in review and wishing a happy new year to all, I wanted to do the same, but I can’t. Even though I’m a writer with a public access blog, I find the exposure of Facebook too much, and besides, there are still people there who judge me on past deeds for which I’ve made amends. In any case, this is too long for the average attention span on Facebook. Nevertheless, I’m anxious.

I didn’t know where to start with this. With all I’m going through (dad unwell, my personal independence payment taken away, depression, anxiety…) it’s hard to know where it begins and ends. And that’s what’s been putting me off of writing lately. But even as I write this, I’m reminded that writing is my only coping mechanism for my mental health when I’m on my own. Rather than start from the very beginning, this is the middle of an episode.

I’m typing from notes I scribbled longhand in a pocket notebook my kids bought me, which compliments the time machine I wear on my wrist. But I was in danger of running out of space in that inner heart, so I’m transcribing my pencil (naturally, the Staedtler Norris 122).

I see my friends posting those year-end sentiments, and I envy them. They’re able to say what I can’t, for fear of judgement. What I have and they don’t, is a self-loathing for all the harm I did when I was drunk (five years ago now). I’ve rebuilt the bridges I burned, but others can’t find it in themselves to do that. I know I’m better off without that toxicity in my life, but it hurts to lose old friends who simply aren’t prepared to talk and learn. As the same species on this lone planet which we all share as a home (and which we’ve broken) humanity itself could fail by its own devices, unless we keep talking.

So to those still reading, to anyone who found their way over from Facebook, and my blog followers, thanks. Thanks for being you, and for being there, even if you didn’t know that’s where you were. You don’t see me when I wobble, but you’re there without knowing it before I fall down. You don’t grab your hands out for me, but my mind latches onto you. I wouldn’t expect you to know what I’m going through, nor my daily life, because we never talk, and because humans don’t do that any more. Writing is my way of talking, and I know you’re there, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

At the end of any day, week, or cliché, love and music make the world go round. There was a time when I though physics did that, but now I realise it’s biology. Because there’s no substitute for a hug with a fellow human, nor any of our cousins, the animals who were here first. While I may be alone, I still have this connection with the rest of the world.

I’m an introvert who finds conversation difficult with anyone besides friends. Even now as I bear my soul and write this, I don’t want to talk about it. When I publish, a part of me will want to take it down again, lest it attract offers of help.

When someone with depression, anxiety, or any other mental health issue tells you they’re having a hard time, and trusts you enough to tell you, they aren’t doing it because they want you to fix them. They’re telling you because they believe you’re important enough to them to know why they’re not feeling one hundred percent. Respect them for doing that, because they clearly respect you.

Happy New Year, peace and goodwill to all humanity and everyone else whose planet we’re squatters on. Personally, 2019 can’t be as bad as the annus horribilis just gone, much of which was consumed by my battle with the UK government’s social cleansing apparatus. Hopefully I’ll win my appeal tribunal, regain my independence and get my life back. In the UK and around the world, all we need to do is keep talking, even if it’s not in the conventional manner.

Never under-estimate your importance as a human to another conscious entity, no matter how selfish we are as a species. For as long as I have you readers, I’ll keep writing, lest old acquaintance be forgot.

…POSTSCRIPT…

After posting that, two of my friends – old grammar school friends in fact – got in touch, via Facebook funnily enough (via my author page)…

Whatever you’re doing tonight, I hope you enjoy it. 2018, like many years before it, has managed to suck and blow concurrently. In another rotation, we can review 2019 …

… but only briefly.

I was talking to my dog, Pigsy, about you earlier and he said that both of us need to follow Dog’s law. They make a whole lot more sense than the anagram equivalent.

Pigsy went for a walk this morning. I know he enjoyed it but it’s gone now. He’s not wasting time reflecting on whether it was better or worse than any other walk he’s had. Equally, he’s completely forgotten that he ran at the front door so hard & grabbed the mail that the poor fucking Postie had to change his shorts. No, he’s no recollection of the impact with the door, my shouting or the Postie’s pants.

I asked him about tomorrow. He didn’t know what a tomorrow was. I said it was the thing that comes after now. He looked at me with that tilted head that Jack Russell’s have perfected and said “the bit after now, is now … it’s always now, you prick. You still believe you’re the dominant species, right?”

He’s always been a smart arse has my Pigsy but he had a point.

Past events make good stories, but they’re not worth ruminating over. They’ve been. They’ve happened. They’re gone. Unless you’re at the centre of a black hole I suppose, but then everything is happening at once and it all gets horribly non-linear.

Tomorrow. Well, it’s a new year – or it’s a Tuesday. It’s up to us. But, it’s tomorrow and it’s not ‘now’ yet.

Pigsy knows he’ll be going for a walk tomorrow. I’m sure he does; but he’s not arsed in the slightest about it right now. Right ‘now’, he’s stretched across my bed and made it pretty much impossible for me to lie down comfortably. I can’t move him though – he’s making the very best of now you see.

I reckon we should give that a go.

Don’t forget the past & don’t abandon planning your future … but let’s not lose sight of what’s happening now. We’ll miss something new because we were troubling over something old.

I’m not sending this privately in Messenger because I’m happy to wish you a happy new year.

[…]

You are where you are because of how you were wired from before you exited the womb. What happens in the future is already decided; not by god or any higher power but by synaptic connections that started their mechanics nigh on half a century ago. Luckily (or currently), there are too many variables to track to predict where we will be next year – so we can still pretend it was a choice.

Even shorter version – I truly hope your hard wired program has an exit for the subroutine that you call to beat the shit out of yourself. It’s time to leave that behind.

The Earth spins, and travels around the sun. The Milky Way galaxy spins, so that in a day, we each travel around 50m km, every day. So we’re in a different place now, and we’ll be in another in just a moment. Like when the second one came in:

Didn’t want to reply to blog post publicly but hope things pick up for you soon but the main thing I wanted to say was whatever else you do (or don’t do) don’t stop writing… Put simply, writing got you through some awful times before (at least that’s how it looked for the outside). You not wanting to write now should be seen as your ‘inner demons’ trying to make a bad situation worse for you. They are opportunistic like that and worse still no matter how clever you are they are equally clever and you can’t hide anything from them! So grab a pad and your tried, tested & trusted Staedtler Norris 122 and spew it all out onto paper, you don’t have to let anyone else see it as, much of it you won’t want to share with others and that doesn’t matter because committing things to paper seems to be a cathartic act for you.

Names withheld, because at least one is as publicity-shy as me, but I know where they live.

To finish off, my next door neighbour did my laundry today, as my washing machine broke down and I can’t afford a new one. He also bought me a box of chocolates. It’s that connection again, almost as though humans are starting to develop telepathy, just as the animals have been communicating for millions of years. And as I’ve noted in the past, open a box of biscuits, take a dog for a walk, and he’s pretty much nailed the day (in Cyrus Song). But there was more: Someone bought a book, another bought me a coffee.

It’s not even next year yet, but things just got better already. I didn’t brick it and take the post down. In fact, I posted it on my Facebook personal timeline. I’m always keen to make new friends there as well as here, and new followers on my author page, where posts besides these blog entries are more suited to a shorter attention span.

Thanks again for getting all this way. You don’t have to meet someone in person to be a kindred spirit. All of this keeps me going and makes it all worthwhile. It’s time to move on, water under the rebuilt bridges, whether travelled or not. Happy New Year, for the sake of old times and new.

Almost fifty of your Earth years

SCIENCE FICTION

There is no such thing as an indigenous Englishman, and Great Britain isn’t a country (a sovereign state that’s a member of the UN in its own right). As the UK and its politics stand, I despise the history of the former, and I’m ashamed by the latter.

As humankind writes its final chapters here on Earth, I wonder how quickly nature will simply erase us. And I speculate in fiction, where indigenous humans on this planet descend from Pangea, and whites are descended from ancient alien invaders.

It’s just a case of history repeating.

A story can begin with one writer, and end up in the hands of another. It’s all down to a plot device, which can be as simple as the means to write…

THE BEST LAID PLANS

The reason no other animals evolved like humans, is they watched what we did. Then instead of copying us, they concentrated on the important things, like their basic needs and expanding their minds, to eventually speak telepathically, all the while unbeknown to us. It was quite brilliant in its subtlety.

Animal people live alongside a different race: sentient, non-organic, technological beings. And the robots are correct, that they came from the stars, as did we all, and that theirs was a slow evolution with a sudden growth spurt.

There’s a human there, finding her way around on a planet where her ancestors once lived. She’s trying to find something for her son, back on their own home world. It’s a plot device, which allows people to speak in fiction about that which they can’t in real life. It’s what The Unfinished Literary Agency was set up for, way back in her family’s history, and she thinks it will help her son. He’s lost, as she once was, unsure of how worlds revolve outside of physics. But it’s quantum physics which connects us all.

Her son once wrote a plan, presumably one of many, as this was ‘Plan 96’, and all in longhand, using an old silver and black pen. At the time, he’d said it was a story he was working on, but he wasn’t sure where it was going or how it would end. So he left it behind when the humans left Earth. Now the boy is grown up and lost on the home world, wondering what happened to it.

On Earth 3.0 for the most part, industry is confined to the cloud cities, while the planet itself has been left to nature. In 2142, The Shard is a glacial Christmas tree, abandoned by humans a century before and now a towering forest, as nature quickly moved in.

As Eve walked over London Bridge, the locals – known for their tameness – were keen to greet her arrival. Beavers looked from their dams on the Thames, and a group of crows congregated on the handrail. As a collective noun, they were more a horde than a murder.

“Hello, human,” one of them said.

“Hello,” Eve replied.

“What’s your name?” The crow asked.

“Eve.”

“Oh no, not again,” the crow said. Then the horde departed, without any enquiry of her business there.

In Threadneedle Street, the old lady slept under a blanket of ivy, as the Bank of England sat on vaults of human gold. The Old Bailey was tightly wrapped in green vines, where various birds conducted industry, and squirrels and monkeys picked fruit. The British Museum somehow looked as it always should, the building itself now preserved as a record of humanity and maintained by wildlife. The British Library too, where all of mankind’s writing is archived, everything with an International Standard Book Number (ISBN). Goswell Road is still long, but now a wide, wooded path to Islington, and Hotblack Desiato’s old office.

A winding wooden staircase took Eve up to The Unfinished Literary Agency, a small, dark room on the top floor, with a crudely-cut window, about the size of a letterbox, at waist height on the far wall.

Inside was surprisingly clean for an office vacated a century before. Eve wondered who’d maintained it, or perhaps who’d remained after the human exodus. She sat at the desk and tried the lamp. It worked.

The walls were full of shelves, with manuscripts stacked a foot high. More were piled on the floor, and in the tray on the desk. There were hundreds of unwritten books, all untold human stories.

Eve looked in the drawers of the desk: Pens, notepads and other stationery, some candles and a tobacco tin. Then she found a name plate, the Toblerone sort that sits on a desk. In Helvetica black upper case, the name proudly proclaimed itself:

PROF. J.C. HESTER

Eve picked up a bound manuscript from the tray and began to flick through it. Someone had gone to the trouble of drawing a flick book animation in the bottom corner, a simple space rocket taking off in a cloud of smoke, with a person’s face looking from the only porthole. After this five second stick cartoon, the manuscript was entitled ‘So long, and thanks for all the humans, by MC Katze’. It was the story of a man and his cat, in which the cat takes her human to another planet, so that he can see the utopia awaiting mankind in the land promised to them. The twist in the tale is, the cat was an agent of Erwin Schrödinger, who told the human she was operating the spacecraft from inside a box on the flight deck, when she was actually flying it by remote control, and not in the box at all.

Eve heard a noise she wasn’t expecting, which worried her more than it would if it was expected. Her ostiumtractophobia (specifically, a fear of door knobs) was rooted in childhood, when someone (or something) outside had tried the handle of her locked bedroom door. The sound of keys in the door – perhaps ones she’d lost earlier – would be more paralysing still, if it were her door the keys were in.

The already-unlocked door of the office slowly swung open, and a character from one of the Earth 3.0 documentaries she’d watched on the home world walked in.

Looking very much professorial, in a tweed three-piece, topped with a flat cap and a monocle, a chimpanzee walked upright into the room.

“Greetings,” he said, not seeming at all surprised to find Eve in his office. She must have looked puzzled. “It’s the Babel fish,” the chimp said. “Well, it’s not a fish,” he continued, “but that’s what started it. I assume that’s what you’re wondering, how you can hear me?”

“Erm, yes,” Eve replied, “I’ve heard of the Babel fish…”

“Well,” said the chimp, then paused. “Sorry,” he said, “I’m Jules.” He offered a hand.

“Jules.” Eve shook his hand. “I’m Eve.”

“Yes,” Jules said, “short for Julio, see, Jules I mean? Except it’s not, it’s still got five letters. It’s just quicker to say, with only the one syllable. Here’s a funny thing…” Jules lowered himself onto a pile of manuscripts.

“Would you like your chair?”

“Oh no, that’s not my chair. That was here when I arrived, so I’m sort of squatting here now. Besides, sometimes it feels more natural like this. Instinct I suppose.”

“So,” Eve sat back, “this funny thing?”

“Oh yes. Just one of many anecdotes left over by the humans. You’ll be aware of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, I assume?”

“Yes, he invented the world wide web.”

“Clever chap, yes. But here’s the funny thing. The words, world wide and web, are all one syllable. But abbreviated, it’s double-you, double-you, double-you. That’s nine syllables, which is a lot. But I read somewhere that someone suggested he called his invention ‘The Internet Machine’. Well, abbreviated, that would be TIM. And apparently, he was such a modest man, that not only did he give it away for free, he didn’t seek fame or fortune, he just did it for the greater good. It may be apocryphal, but we like it. It’s a rare example of man’s humility, and the web was altruism which could have saved many species. But it all went a bit King Kong didn’t it?”

“It did,” Eve paused. “But you were saying about the Babel fish?”

“Oh yes, I was, wasn’t I? Well, the name just stuck, in a tributary way. You know, not like the geographical river ones, but an historical – and it is an an, with a silent aitch – tribute. But now it’s the universal translation system for the world population.”

“But how can I hear you?”

“Oh, I see, yes. Well, it’s not an implant or anything now, no. No, without getting too technical (not my area), it’s carried in the wind, in radio waves, which are only audible to the subconscious. The upshot is, everyone speaks the same language. And really, that was mankind’s biggest mistake.”

“One of them.”

“Yes, there were a few. But there’d been researchers and ethics committees, scientific essays and peer-reviewed papers, and they all agreed that giving universal translation to the public would generally be a bad idea. Then Google just did it anyway.”

“And others followed.”

“Many. Then everyone.”

“So,” Eve wondered, “the professorship?”

“Oh that. The prof is in English, language, yes. Before that, my doctorate was in human psychology. I think the way the world changed was what guided me more into the languages, you know, in case they died out, with everyone using the Babel fish and all, and technology always hurrying them along. And the thing about being a professor is, I teach teachers how to teach teachers to teach, which I rather like. Took a jolly lot of work though.

“But next, I want to do something different. I’m studying history, so I can teach the teachers about how it all went wrong. Because although the humans are gone, their past can teach us a lot.

“I’m not a religious man, but whenever someone said everyone shouldn’t speak the same language, they might have been right. It’s a good thing if you’re a species evolved enough to debate, but take away certain barriers and an immature race will abuse it, with some using it for their own gain and not for the greater good. Someone was always going to package it up and sell it as a religion, or make it some kind of privilege, when it was around all the time. Us animals – as you used to call us – us people, had been communicating for many thousands of years before humans came along. Then the humans found out and wanted it for themselves.

“It’s a tragic story but it’s a lesson from history which I’d like to tell others about, and of how that led to the evolution of the planet we see around us now. So it was all for the good really. I only hope humanity took that lesson away with them.”

“It might be too early to tell,” Eve said.

“How are things over there?” the professor wondered.

“Lonely.”

“That’s the thing with humans. When we look at your monuments, buildings, and many follies, you are capable of such beautiful dreams. But within those are some terrible nightmares.”

“I know, Carl Sagan said something similar.”

“Who’s she?”

“He. He was a scientist, a thinker, and an inspiration.”

“A dreamer then? And that’s the sad thing. Humans who dream are ridiculed if they speak of their visions. They become suppressed. But allowed to explore and discover, those people can transcend accepted human wisdom, in things like politics, which was a human invention anyway.

“Anarchy is not chaos, when people are trusted to be individually empowered. An evolved race will sort it all out. But the ones who rise above it all are feared by those who govern and rule, and that leads to conflict. Conflict gets no-one anywhere, but debate can increase mutual understanding to find peaceful solutions. Too many humans were greedy, not just financially but morally.

“I studied human politics for a while, and I had to conclude, it was quite a waste of time, for the humans. All it did was hold them back. It was a system which kept radical thinkers beyond its borders of conditioning. And the radical thinkers were only just getting a voice when everyone else did, so it got deafening.

“If you ask me, I’d say most humans are essentially left-wing by nature, only becoming conditioned otherwise. Wherever you lie (or tell the truth) on the political spectrum, beyond that, you’re all human. Yet the one thing you all have in common is the very thing which drives you apart. Individuality is to be encouraged, but you can’t think as one. You’re generally a socially aware species. It’s just a shame there were so many who didn’t qualify by that credential.”

“You have a deep understanding of the human condition,” Eve said, looking around the room.

“Sometimes it helps not to be one to know one.”

“Do you have a theory, on why the Babel fish was the catalyst?”

“I think there’s one thing it will never be able to do, because it shouldn’t, and it ought to remain impossible. That thing, would be the interpretation of messages, of how they’re perceived by the receiver, which of course is completely subjective on the part of the individual, regardless of the intention of the messenger. Words only have meaning for some people if a specific person says them. The Babel fish is a translation device, not an interpreter. Too many humans, in their cut-off personal worlds, their microcosm universes, their ignorance and laziness, quite literally took too many things far too literally. And a breakdown in communication is conflict by any other name.

“But even more fundamental, was humans’ sense of entitlement. A progressive race, but for their own gains. I know there are millions of exceptions, and it’s equally tragic that their voices were silenced. But back in human politics, that would be a victory for the right. More of you need to find your left wings, outside of your politics. You need to metaphorically fly free, or be allowed to, without those wings being clipped.

“There’s a passage I’ve memorised, from one of your films. ‘I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice. But still, the place you live in is that much more drab and empty that they’re gone’. It was a film one of the crows showed me. Her ten-times-great grandfather had a cameo in that film. He’s uncredited though.”

“That was The Shawshank Redemption, a prison film.”

“Yes, very good too. Now there was a human who used an unfair situation which had been forced upon him, to do good for others, to blow a whistle and bring down a dictatorship. He quietly went about a longer plan, rarely drawing attention, then escaped the tyranny. I suppose we miss those kinds of people, the free in spirit. We are all spirits when we sleep, after all, with the means for the enquiring mind to explore the universe.”

“Some more than others,” Eve added, looking out of the window. “When all we needed to do was keep talking.”

“Quite ironic really, isn’t it?”

“Looked at like this, yes.”

“But you’re looking at something no-one’s seen for some time. For you it’s nostalgia.”

“It’s a feeling of being home. And you speak of humans quite sentimentally.”

“Well, I felt I got to know a few, through my grandfather’s stories from the zoo.”

“He was in London Zoo?”

“Chester actually. We moved down to London when the zoos closed. All my family as far as I can trace, were captive bred, as they used to be called. But my great, great grandfather was an immigrant from New York, and he’s the first I can find with the family name Hester.”

“Er, how?” Eve turned to Julio.

The professor stood up and stretched. “Well, Boris – that’s my great, great grandfather – was rescued by a writer called Hester Mundis. She found him in a pet shop when he was young. She bought him, not as a pet, but to liberate him, and he lived with her and her eight-year-old son, in their apartment in Manhattan. I know Hester was expecting another child, so she found Boris a home with other chimps in Chester, and I gather he was on TV a few times. She wrote about him too, so he was immortalised in books, which must be a nice thing to have happen to yourself.

“So we took her name, because she became mum to my orphaned or kidnapped great, great grandfather. If it wasn’t for her, I might not be here. I may never have been.”

“And you didn’t mind being in captivity?”

“I worked a lot of other things out there. You do, when you have the time and your basic needs are taken care of.”

“You didn’t feel imprisoned?”

“I’d never known anything else. I was never in the wild. Perhaps one day I’ll visit my own home country, but I learned a lot when humans were in charge. There are lots of arguments for and against on both sides. Those are less relevant now, but future historians will have plenty to write about. For now, I have plenty to write of here.”

“Why’s that?”

“Let’s rewind a little. A long time ago, a human said that given an infinite supply of typewriters, an infinite number of monkeys would reproduce the Complete Works of Shakespeare. And it stands to reason that, given those resources, they would. But we wondered, why? What would be the point?”

“It was a human thing?”

“It was. But there was a flaw in that original plan.”

“Which was?”

“The monkeys. No offence to those with tails, but what it really needed was apes. You don’t even need an infinite number of them.

“So after we’d finished reproducing Shakespeare’s works, we got started on the next plan. Then we quickly realised we might need more writers. Not an infinite supply, but far more than we have. Personally, I don’t think it’s possible.”

“What’s not?”

“Plan 96 is to discover and write the answer to the ultimate question, that of life, the universe and everything. But infinite apes aside, I don’t think humans are looking in the right place.”

“So where do we look?”

“Look into your heart, and don’t be afraid of yourself, because people might like that person.

“This was only your temporary home. You were squatters here before your nomadic race continued their journey, to find themselves. For now, you are gone from here, and you need to return to yourself. But there’s a record of how it all started, and how things panned out, right here, where it began.

“It all started with a simple device: an old pen, and it’s a story close to my heart. But now it’s yours.”

Jules reached into his breast pocket and handed Eve a silver and black pen.

© Louis Laker and Steve Laker.

The Unfinished Literary Agency is available now.

If I had a hammer and a wrench

POETRY