The Moon’s a Baboon

Once, there lived a trapper, deep in the woods of New England. His name was Jim, and this is his story. 

Trapper Jim scratched his beard and frowned. He had a problem– the local waterfall that he loved had become a hotspot for mooners. You know mooning?– people dropping their trousers and showing their bums to an aloof and indifferent world.

Jim knew the spot well. Local lads would go up to the top of Moon Falls of an evening, drunk and silly, stand atop a slippery rock in the blue-black crystalline night, and moon the whole town. And sometimes these young men, in their impetuosity, would stumble on the slippery rocks and tumble to their bare-bottomed end. These loonie moonlight mooners, falling to their deaths like exploding stars.  

Jim wanted to stop these mooners. He didn’t care that their activities contravened local Health and Safety regulations; it seemed like a lot of nonsense to him. Heck, his animal traps contravened every local law he knew of– especially the little stick on a spring that would repeatedly poke the little critters as they slowly carked it. "Insult to injury? Who cares?!" thought Jim. Anyway, the reason Jim wanted to save the mooners from their watery splash-deaths was because he felt for these wayward youths, and understood them. He’d once been a young tyke too. 

Jim sighed, put on his tatty trapper’s hat. It was wearing thin around the ears. Then he opened the door of his log cabin, and strolled through the woods, towards the waterfall. “Taste my brains,” he thought to himself. “Cream of tomato soup”. He was a bit crazy from all this time alone in the woods– only venturing into town to sell the furs of the animals he had caught, buy some beans in watermelon sugar and then return. He loved these outdoor walks amidst the bracken– Jim could see nature opening up around him. Now it was the Fall, and the leaves were as if on fire, with rich reds and golds flickering in the sunshine breeze. Fat flies spun in lazy circles, like badly-hit swingballs. A small baboon mooned him from high up on a branch, then lost his footing and fell, making a squawking noise as he tumbled down. 

And suddenly Jim realised-

It was MOONAGEDDON!

Everywhere you looked there were people mooning. It was the END of the mooning WORLD! The famous man mooned the red cup. Tourists lined up on Tower Bridge to moon the River Thames. Barack Obama mooned Gordon Brown– Gordon Brown got upset, and mooned his cabinet. Even Morrissey was quoted as saying he’d like to drop his trousers to the Queen. And a clown had just paid 37 million dollars to go up in a space rocket and MOON the WORLD! “Ladies and Gentlemen, we are mooning in SPACE!” It was the fall of mankind– reduced to base displays of bare-faced cheeks. Jim suddenly knew what he must do– find the Cave of Clod and slay the Bum-dragon. Only then would its terrible grip on the world be broken, with the destruction of the radio-transmitter in its head. The signal of the transmitter caused strange behaviours– nuns to show buns, Aunts to drop pants, students to display butt-impudence– by breaking it, Jim could restore the moral fibre of the globe, save it from the horror of the flashed twin-globes. The Bum-dragon’s evil plan was no less than the complete debasement of humanity– at which point he would put on a golden crown and declare himself King. 

First the monkeys learned dissent, thought Jim– then they learned to hate, and then they discovered war, and tools for war. Their buttocks grew larger, as a display signal to warn the males of other tribes– to show dominance. Sexual dominance, aggressive dominance. 

This had become more and more complex over the millennia, as the apes evolved into humans, until now there was no connection between the pre-frontal cortex and the ass. Mental Mind Man was alienated from his dirty bottom. The rational reasoning that could build bombs, and skyscrapers into the clouds, was completely at odds with the lower brain that just wanted to strut, fight and fuck. The monkey had gone crazy– the baboon was ever evolving a bigger and smellier ass. Now it was a nuclear arse-nal. One flash of the arse-nal, and whole nations could be cowed into submission. The monkey was insane, drunk with power.

*

The Headmaster closed the exercise book, and eyed Peter queerly, a bit like Nick Hewer from The Apprentice. “So this is your entry for the college fiction competition?”

“…Sir”, Peter nodded. He scratched his nose, and adjusted his spectacles.

“What on earth…?” The headmaster shook his head. “It’s puerile, weird and ridiculous!” He licked his lips– thirsty. The thirsty man took a sip from the red cup. “And also an altogether avoidable abounding of alliteration, an affectation that is actual arse. Plus inter-rhymes that are annoying and cloying.”

“It’s satire, Sir– it’s about the perceived breakdown of societal mores already– linking it all back to mankind’s inability to tame his primitive simian desires no matter how far he develops his rationality. In a conflict between the ancient limbic system of the brain, and the neo-cortex, which is a relatively recent evolutionary development, the Primal desires will always win. It all becomes clear when Jim meets the Bum-dragon”. Peter was certainly a wordy fellow, and no mistake.

“I’m sorry Peter”, said the Headmaster, “but I’m not impressed.” He stood up, loosened his belt, stood up on the desk and mooned him. 

*

Jim reached the entrance to the Cave of Clod, lair of the Bum-dragon. He felt apprehensive. The Bum-dragon was only 3 inches long, but it could shoot fire from it’s mouth for at least a centimetre, a blazing fire that could really smart. Its razor-sharp claws could give you a nasty scratch, a bit like a paper cut, that might sting for hours. And its scaly skin could induce chafing, perhaps even a rash. It was truly a force to be reckoned with. 

Jim pulled his wits about him. Could this be a trap to trap the trapper, in his crappy trappers hat? He took one deep breath, exhaled, and then strode purposefully into the cave, on the way accidentally stepping on the Bum-dragon who was sleeping by the entrance, killing it instantly. The Bum-dragon made a noise like a child’s squeaky toy as it perished, and then it lay still, stone dead, its fat pink bum displayed to the world; irreverent in death as in life. 

The transmitter in its head beeped one last time, and then was quiet. The signal that had caused the world a powerful urge to reveal cheeky buns was gone. Thousands of Gelada Baboons suddenly felt the urge to put on trousers. Bulky-buttocked builders set off to buy big belts. And gay cowboy stereotypes, wearing naught but leather chaps, suddenly felt ashamed. It was like Adam and Eve redux– they all saw that their bums were naked, and they were ashamed. Would you Adam and Eve it?!

Jim looked at the Bum-dragon’s squashed form. Something somewhere had shifted, but he wasn’t sure what. He vowed to stop trapping animals in his unnecessarily cruel snares for their profitable pelts– instead he would make his living from collecting organic monkey eggs and selling them to the townspeople. This world could never be a Utopia he mused, but maybe, just maybe, it could become… a little kinder. And a little eggier. Like a kinder egg. He turned and ambled towards home, enjoying the fresh breeze, and whistling the theme from Night-Rider.

An utterly irrelevant and gratuitous sex scene

While walking, Jim thought back to that time in Antigua, with Lucy-Anne. Kissing her passionately, as he forcefully pushed her buttocks up against the wall; her fine fingers frantically fumbling at the belt on his jeans, grasping his ass. His mind was consumed with passion; thoughts of drinking from the furry clam. Penetrating her quivering quim with his trifle-rifle. Processing her though the Penal System. 

*

The Headmaster closed the exercise book once again and shook his head. He held up a small sign with a :rolleyes: smiley drawn on it in magic marker. He googled an image of a Captain Picard facepalm on his laptop, and spun the screen round to show to Peter. There was a pause.

“It still makes no sense,” he said at last, “the philosophical musings are weird and simplistic, and as for that filth at the end…” The thirsty man took another sip from the red cup. “And what’s an organic monkey egg, by the way? Monkeys don’t even live in America, and they certainly don’t lay eggs. ”

Peter examined his fingernails. 

“This story better be leading up to some kind of clever ending that ties all the loose strands together, is all I can say,” said the Headmaster, before going on to say more. “Is the ‘mooning’ a reference to the spread of anti-social behaviour? What then does this say about the function of Law in our Western civilisation? Does the moon-transmitter represent the power of television to influence society in increasingly vulgar and depraved ways? You could then portray the trapper, Jim, as some kind of neo-Luddite, and talk about new technology informing a breakdown in moral values for a bit already. What do you think?”

“BUM-DRAGON!” sniggered Peter, as he stood and undid his pants… 


Fin

(This is a work of fiction. It was sponsored by ‘White Ace’– (“Ace Price! Only £3.29!”) and any similarity between characters alive or dead is purely stupid. Apart from the Bum-dragon. He’s real.)

Adrift

In this humidity the window swells, tightening against its frame. I lean over her shoulder to force it open. It stands fast at first but then, with a heave, it gives and yawns out wide. I follow after, listing forwards, up against the sill, head part out of the hole, scrabbling to regain my balance. Moonlight dapples the surface of the water, twenty feet below.

She laughs, her mouth close to my ear. I lever myself back up with an embarrassed smile. An awkward apology and I retake my seat, opposite her, composed again.

The others in the cabin seem too drunk to have noticed. She talks on some more about what she has come from – her home and her family - and then some more on her destination, fiddling with the ring on her right hand. Here her voice deadens a little.

I refill her glass then mine. We drink for a while in silence.

The varnished table top is scarred. Different blades have gouged down to a variety of browns. My knife is stronger and sharper than most. My father gave it to me. It comes from a good place off of the Strand. I carve my name deeply into the wood, overwriting others in a light tone.

When I look up again she is gazing out to sea. I ask her what she is looking for. She smiles and says little. Her hair is dark. Sometimes the curls stick to the sweat on her cheeks. She has to brush them away with her hand. Even at this time of night the temperature maintains.

Around the cabin a few men sleep slumped over tables. A gaggle in the corner crowd around a candle; still smoking their pipes, drinking from their tankards. Their talk has calmed now and they speak fitfully. The captain hasn’t been seen for days. Some of the men say he has the fever. Others that he’s already passed on. Morale is low. The doldrums take their toll on all of us.

I ask her why she has come tonight. Why she is allowed to sit with me now. She fiddles further with the ring and talks on a little of curiosity and ennui. But she doesn’t answer me.

A heaviness lies thick in here. The heat, the humidity, the wine, the endless drifting; with all the senses dulled the mind wanders off into stranger places. I look up, half expecting her to have heard my thoughts. She has been watching me and smiles back. There is something light and feverish in her eyes.

Then she rises and grabs me by the hand, and I am not so sure, but she pulls me out of my seat and drags me through out past into the creaking corridor and we bundle up the stairs, up onto the deck.

It is cooler up here and I take a swig from the bottle and pass it to her and she sips a little and passes it back. She wanders over to the sides and rests against the rails, staring out to the sea and the night sky.

I look about but there is no one else on deck. High in the rigging the lookout sleeps, his snores floating down. In this still, heavy air there is no need for a helm. The captain lets us drift out on the currents.

When I come alongside and lean against the rail she asks me my Christian name. I tell her and ask for hers but she refuses.

I see her fiddling with something and then she casts me a glance of mischief. There is a splash from the water below. She laughs and holds up her hand, bare of the ring.

It was gold. Or silver maybe. It must have cost a good deal, certainly more than my commission. She comes from a good family.

We are close now and she presses up against me. My mouth is dry and I take another swig. She takes the bottle from my hand and sets it on the rail. Should I say something, is there anything left to say?

We kiss.

And then we move away and I lead her to the fore. And I notice how blue her eyes are as we lie down together upon the furled mainsail.

Tranquility

Tranquility



We made it to last. It COST. In the half light of low-lamps, huddled beneath inflated crew domes we exchanged high fives, touched fists and made air kisses.
Cost wasn’t measured so much in tonnage, not in materiel or even in human cost, although that was plentiful. It was too long out there. Many of the workers ended up addicted to painkillers, alcohol, neurostims. The usual get out substances. Not a few found God, Allah, Satan or the fucking Supreme Being. The point was that for to many the starscape broke them somewhere. Reduced to a mote for so long they internalised it.
And then they called us back. One last mission for the assorted crew of deep sea habitat engineers, a washed up doctor and one genuine space Marine. Spizer, drummed out from the Peoples Army for political subversion.
Of course none of us said no. A chance to see that starscape once more?
If you could see…


Entry was fast. We’d borrowed a ride from an obsolete beast dragging a probe towards the Kupier belt

‘Sizer. On command. Lock frequencies’

The usual scramble.

‘Team Atried to the left flank, Hark to the right. This is the most expensive beer man has ever produced people. Get on it and think of those palaces and bitches back home’

‘Hey’

‘Stow it and think of the men then! Do this right and we all retire on pensions that would make an oil tycoon blush’

It comes into view. And it’s beautiful. An entire crater filled with growing barley, dead still and almost obscenely large,. Logic tells you to grow low g crops to feed the third world. Logic tells you that beer brewed from lunar barley is just the same as Earth beer but nonetheless fools will buy a round that costs an average months wages for a worker. There is one born every minute. And sometimes, there’s one that dies every minute.

‘Hark 5 what the fuck are you doing?’

‘Just went to look at the ‘scape boss. It’s beautiful…..I’

static. Connection cut she sailed over the dome and into the black. Full burn. We held one hero back from sacrificing himself to follow her in some stupid rescue action. Tranquillity Corp doesn’t give us fuel for recovery missions. Shit we wouldn’t be here in the first place if they could trust the machines.

Hoarse sobs came over the com, I tuned them out and dealt with my own. I’d loved her to. You get that tight on these runs.

Then we were in. Past the brainless chattering protocols of entry and that oh-so-smashable corporate smile on the welcoming screen.

Three drones tend these fields, jealous guardians of humanities most expensive grain crop. These are bleeding edge state of the art. TranqCorp spares no cost when it comes to protecting the moonside crops They hang, wasp-formed and iridescent with sterilising nanoslime. We rude guests are immediately treated to a coating of the same as they race and spray with insectile grace.

Then Jonah. An experiment in cetacean mind mapping fused to human brain architecture. Made during the boom days when TranqCorp had R&D departments to rival the Peoples Rebuplic of China’s military. A dead end. Functionally to far up the autism scale to provide the flexibility demanded in combat roles, exiled up here like the mad old woman locked in the attic
‘Gents’ a hint of wheeze-moan accompanied his every communication. Fully formed as a tank-like structure, tracks and VTOL. He hung back from us respectfully, mindful of our fragility. He eschewed the basic look and pushed a different display through the visual ports. Jonah was quite simply an angel. Dragonfly wings and an elfin body hanging beneath it. His intrusive scans were played like a wand scattering fairydust. It was hard to hate Jonah despite him calling us here, losing us Rachel. There was something altogether tragic about this chained sentience.

‘There is a parasite in the Northern Quarter’

Sizer’s choking splutter filled nobody with courage

‘A fucking what! How in the name of Jesus Shitting Chri..’

‘A boll weevil of some kind. Mutated. Too large for the drones or myself. You are armed yes’

It was not a question. Each of us cradled a small needle rifle. The ammunition broke up after a hundred paces. Even that shit makes people jumpy in a sealed environment. Screw the Suits, breach this dome and we’d kiss bye bye to any pension and riches back on earth.

‘That’s a cotton parasite’ low Texan drawl from Gransc, at my left ‘and what the fuck happened to quarantine procedures?’

‘There’s been cutbacks earthside’ wheezed Jonah

‘You don’t say?’ Spizers sarcasm is wasted on the machine.

Let me tell you what the Sea of Tranquillity looks like. I told you we built it to last. Five ‘scraper sized struts of spun buckycarbon arc over the dome itself, a clutching fist on a dome that should have been the spun hyperdiamond we were promised way back when. Instead the struts support a complex layering of silicates, plastics and a skinny layer of industrial diamond. Each strut is mounted with a point-defense rail gun to keep rocks at bay. It’s the most expensive dome this side of the Mons Olympus hotel. We produce the beer that can bankrupt a small kingdom if the King gets too generous.
It’s not earthside Greenfield flattering. The terraforming is minimal. These plants are obscenely misshapen; no breeze ever stirs them. When Sol isn’t doling out the free energy the huge lamps hanging from the domes supports rain down incandescent actinic light. To the side of it all it the drone processing facility. A squat, black hexagon that receives us with ill grace.

‘Why the fuck didn’t you inform TranCorp before now?’ Sizer is annoyed. I see his point.

‘Protocol states your crew is first. I apologise for my lack of flexibility on corporate issues’

The inflection leaves no doubt as to how sorry Jonah is.

If I could have killed that fucking robot I would have done. We found the boll weevil, a pathetic insect. It’s limbs and basic design had failed to adapt to basic lunar gravity. Grossly over done and dragging it’s spindly, broken limbs behind it. We found it by the trail of slime from its weeping wounds and none of us felt much but mute revulsion for the thing as we emptied needleguns into the head and thorax.

Tranquillity Beer, the most expensive brew in the universe. Drink up.

full moon blues

Just what the fuck was I doing last night? I must have had, what, fourteen pints or something. I can’t remember most of it. It’s now 4pm, and for the last hour I’ve been squatted over Dave’s toilet. I can barely stand up. Oh, God. Oh, God, Oh, God. What did I do?

The last I remember was Chris saying that it’s the full moon. It’s the full moon, make a wish. Make a fucking wish. Fucking bollocks. I must have enjoyed it, mind you – the best weekends are the ones you don’t remember.

“Oi! Andrew, mate, come out of there!” I stand up, nearly fall over again. I catch sight of myself in the mirror; God, I look like shit. Karina was there last night. Karina…my God. I hope I didn’t do anything stupid. Like kiss her. Or try to kiss her.

I stumble to the door, slip on the tiles. Why’s the floor so wet? Oh, God, I’ve gone and pissed all over his floor, haven’t I. Shit. I don’t remember. I push the door open with my elbow.

“Andrew?” He shuts the door right in my face. I hear him muttering something. “Andrew, what’s happened to your arm?” For the last hour or so, I felt something prickling on my arm – that’s when you really know you’re worse for wear, innit? I thought I saw these things – like, black things. Spiders’ legs. Or something.

I look down. My head’s spinning. Oh, God. I’m so hairy. Last night – last night, there was that girl. Alice. As I went to the bar, last night, she came up to me, she put her arms around me, she said, Andrew, my love, how are you doing? And Alice, you know, I’d not seen her in a long time; I went to school with her – but then…she bit me. She fucking bit me.

My ears – fuck I must have drank a lot last night – they’re different. My nose is too long – maybe it’s just me, fucking Dave always ragging on me about my nose…I put a finger on it and my god, it’s wet, like last night I did think I was getting ill or something…

So I splash water on my face. I forgot to shave yesterday. That must be it. Yeah. I forgot. And Karina was there. My fucking God. I shouldn’t have sent that text. Why did I send it? What was I thinking?

I don’t want to come out of the bathroom.

“Andrew? You all right, fella?”
No.
I stand up, open the door. And as I look round I catch myself in the mirror. God, I look like some kind of … dog …

Sunday morning against the Moon

“I’m telling you mate, the Moon are in for a stuffing,” Ralph said to me, shoving the last of his Wetherburger into his mouth with the jubilation of a hyena on half a gram of uncut coke.

“Why’s that, then?” I asked Ralph. He’d already had about ten pints that afternoon, and I knew where the rest of Saturday would be heading.

“Right, today, I’ve only drunk Holsten Pils.”

I looked at Ralph a little curiously. His off-duty-banker clobber, the chinos and casual-ish shirt, was already covered in spilled beer, his hair a mess and his speech beginning to slur.

“And…?” I replied inquisitively, “What on earth does what you’ve drunk have to do with it?”

“Well,” Ralph replied, “Whenever I drink Carling the day before a match, we always play an insipid load of crap, and lose 1-0. If I drink Stella, we go three-nil up before collapsing gloriously to 4-3 or 5-3. If I drink Fosters, it’s a respectable 2-0 defeat or win, nothing that interesting either way.
But Holsten…”

Ralph’s wiry, gaunt face acquired an almost dreamy complexion as he half closed his eyes in remembrance of some former glory or another, then reopened them with a mood of defiant exuberance.

“The day we played The Falcon. Remember that?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I remember. We thrashed ‘em 7-0. You got four of them.”

“Well, there’s your proof! I drank Holsten Pils and nothing else the night before that game.”

“Coincidence,” I replied, “New age hokey-cokey superstition masquerading as innocent banter.”

“Whatever, Steve,” Ralph replied, “You’re a goalie. I expect bloody-minded logic from you lot.”

Mike, our rather geeky friend (and erstwhile right midfielder) who worked for Islington Council (doing quite what, he never really would actually tell us, but he did ‘work’ for them, although the amount of time he spent emailing and surfing the net during office hours would have given most Daily Mail readers fits of apoplexy) sat down and chucked his Guardian on the seat next to him.

“Mike!” Ralph greeted him, “Getting the beers in then?”

“Hmm,” Mike replied, “Actually I’ve been pondering the strategy for tomorrow’s game.”
“Tonight is not the night for pondering strategies!” Ralph said, “Tonight’s the night for celebrating tomorrow morning’s historic victory!”

“Technically,” Mike replied, “A victory isn’t a victory until you’ve actually gained it. It would be rather preemptive to simply go out to celebrate one in advance. Remember the bookies who paid out on Arsenal winning the title in the 2002-2003 season so early in the season that they looked rather stupid when Man United won the title instead?”

“Shut up, Mike,” Ralph said, “It’s a laugh, isn’t it. I mean it don’t matter if we actually lose does it?”

“Well it does to me,” Mike replied, “The shame if we go out to celebrate tonight and
then get thrashed!”

“Evening, fellas,” Ian, our left back, said, sitting down on his barstool with his pint of Stella, taking off his rather Matrix-esque coat and sunglasses and untying his dreads, “What’s going down then?”

“Just discussing tonight’s shenanigans,” I replied, “You ready to keep that twat of a right midfielder in your pocket tomorrow then?”

“Absolutely,” Ian replied, “I’ve been thinking of going down the Electric Ballroom tonight. Anyone else up for it?”

“I’ll join you, and I reckon George will.”

“You freaks!” Ralph sneered at us, “I’m off to Soho, if any of you decide to embrace civilisation, you’re free to join me. The rest of the lads are going too. If not, see you in the morning.”

With that, Ralph rounded up Mike and the others, and they all left in several taxis. Ian, George and I stayed in the pub a while longer before heading over to Camden.
-
Of course, when you’ve got a football game first thing on a Sunday morning, against your most hated rivals of a pub team, it probably isn’t particularly wise to stay up til 4 am dancing to goth and heavy metal before walking halfway across London, crashing round at my place smoking spliffs for two hours in the front room and then walking, already completely massacred, down to Hackney Marshes.

When we arrived at the ground, the others looked just as annihilated as us, but pretended not to be.

“Dear oh dear, Steve,” Mike said to me as I entered the changing room, “Those bastards at the Moon have beaten us the last five times. It will just be too shameful if we lose today as well.”

As we walked, in our various states of inebriation/knackeredness, out onto the field, we noticed that The Moon had been preparing somewhat more seriously than we had. They were already on the field, in formation, in immaculately white kits, and not a single one of them looked as if they had been burning a candle at all, let alone at both ends.

“Fear not,” Ralph said, nudging me, “I stuck to the Holsten. Trust me, we’re going to slaughter them.”

I hoped he was right. It would be a pretty big achievement if I just managed to survive 90 minutes without collapsing.

As it turned out, he was entirely right. The Moon had most of the possession, we somehow soaked it up, and scored two lucky goals on the counter.

For now, I had to concede Ralph’s silly football superstitions were, quite often, entirely accurate.

Three thirty am

It’s three thirty in the morning. I sit, as I always do, in the black, hard, plastic chair beside your bed. It’s been so long now, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to lie back in a soft bed and get a real night’s sleep. In any event, the notion of going back to our home, now, by myself, and remembering you, the beautiful life we had together, gives me chills.

Most nights, the nurses will come at about eleven and ask if I’m planning to stay by your side until Doomsday. They always know what the answer is going to be. And I haven’t given up hope. If I lost you, it would be as if I had lost myself, so I cannot leave, I cannot walk out of that door at any moment other than when I absolutely have no choice but to.

I’ve called out to you so many times, I’ve said things that might trigger something, some small thing in your brain, about times we have shared together. Sometimes I do start to realise that maybe I should go home, try to get my life back together, and wait for you to wake up from a bit more of a distance.

It still tortures me, the guilt, the not knowing and wondering. What if I had managed to get out of that emergency meeting at 5.30 which meant my getting home an hour earlier, and therefore had some chance of stopping the intruder. What if I’d chosen a flat on a different floor? Then he never would have even chosen to attempt to burgle our place.

The hospital is in beautiful grounds, surrounded as it is by thick oak forest and in its immediate vicinity are large expansive lawns which more mobile patients get the chance to venture out onto during the day. Every day they come and see me and say why don’t you go outside, stretch your legs, you could use the fresh air, but every day up until now I’ve declined.

Now, though, I am starting to wonder how much I am helping, and how much will you remember of me when you do wake up.

I get up, at last, off my ever-weary hospital chair and walk to the window, looking over the grounds lit by the nightlights outside the building. I need it, need it now, that fresh air, to feel some cool breeze on my face again. I’m such a fixture here that nobody will mind, so I slip out through the side door and walk across the lawn, basking in the wonderful, cool night air. I walk away from the building until I reach a secluded spot where I can lie on the grass and look at the moon and pretend for a moment that I have not a trouble in the world, that I am young again, a brand new fresh book of empty pages.

The doctors and nurses are right. I am achieving nothing by continuously waiting and worrying. Tomorrow I will go home. You need a life to come back to, after all, when you wake up.

I tiptoe back to the main building and in through the side door. A few very-early-morning porters see me and cast me a disparaging look. As I go back up the stairs, I remember the day we first met… I remember the day I asked you to marry me… our deciding to move in together… the early bliss… and then the inevitable problems, my losing my job, the stress that caused us and you then losing our only baby. I blame myself for so much of what has happened that I will never be happy until you wake up and we can try to start again, to actually organise the wedding which we should have had but which was left to flounder due to a mixture of inactivity and the slight distance which had begun to grow between us.

I gather my things and head for the door. All the way down the corridor and out to the taxi, I keep thinking that you will wake up any second, that my leaving will somehow trigger it.

I get in the taxi and tell him to drive somewhere, anywhere, which will be covered by the money I have on me. I’m not going back to that flat. They will find a way to contact me.

End of an Era

Barry was having a difficult day. A couple of hours ago, he'd been put 'at risk of redundancy' by the company. Whilst wrapped in all kinds of contractually obliged nonsense, this basically meant he was fucked. It'd nearly happened plenty of times before and he'd got off lightly, but those days were different, when he'd had enough colleagues to stay unionised, a force to be reckoned with. No arbitration or workers' solidarity this time, not since Thatcher.

No one would want him at his age, thought Barry, not anywhere good. His experience made him not just expensive, but over qualified too, and his entire sector was downsizing or being outsourced anyway. What they'd now rebranded as Maritime Solutions was all online these days since some modernisation initiative or other, and even the administrative work for the lasses in Cycles had morphed into a privately financed initiative run from abroad. Front of house staff came and went on an almost monthly basis, generally giving customers the impression all was well, but there was nothing left upstairs. Deskilling, they'd called it. Rubbish. He hadn't lost a single one of his, just the chances to apply them.

The auditors had labelled him unviable, but it would be the performance objectives that would seal the tomb. Numbers, numbers. What place had they here? This was an old man's game, a craft, a hard slog to do things right. Just two decades ago, suggest to his lot that they should focus on throughput or volumes or leveragising maximal market synergies and you'd be lucky to walk away. The job was a job that you did until it was done, not a set of viewing figures and performance metrics for some executive's assistant to shred.

No more audience share, no more job, not after this. A for-the-records evaluation on Friday, then gather your things, help yourself to a slice of sorry pie and quietly go fuck yourself. Not even the end was handled properly. A list of root passwords and the odd stray command, a folder from finance and a ransom demand. Those are a few of my favourite things. Entertaining such notions crossed his mind, but it was echoed by the hollow question of whether anyone would even care, and thus it was dismissed.

Whatever trivial gesture he made, it wasn't going to equal the enormity of the history around him. He recollected how this used to be a job that the everyman aspired to. When his building first opened, passers-by on the street would literally gawp up at its majestic marble features, wondering what sort of success they would have to become if they were ever to claim a place in its halls. Now it was an greying oddity, an outmoded colossus amongst an orbiting mash of modernist metal and glass, barely a living soul inside.

One last unread email to deal with tonight. It explained the absolute operational importance of the handoff he'd have to start tomorrow. Not likely, he chuckled. There would be no closure gained from this, no leaving ceremony, just another week but with none more to follow it. Tomorrow he would be quite ill.

He shoved the contents of a drawer into his bag, and picking up his things, he ambled downstairs and into the foyer, pausing to switch off the lights. It was a starry night outside, a carefully engineered pattern he knew well. He paused to take in its impressive vastness, then solemnly strolled away home across the car park without even the clichéd glance back it demanded. He wouldn't grant them such significance.

In the darkness at his newly vacated desk, his telephone rang out, and discovering no one left to do its bidding, the computer drew a beautiful spiral.

The Easy Way Out - A Sci Fi Lullaby

I always liked doing things the hard way. When I was a kid I travelled round Europe on boats and trains, journeys that might have taken an hour by plane stretched out into days of sitting still laced with occasional bouts of running, clutching a rucksack and panicking at various incompetent people in various uniforms in various half-learned languages. But when I arrived I knew where I was. Too far from a warm bed was where I usually found myself, and too poor to buy any food more complicated than bread and apples. And so here I am again, the silly little luddite pretending to have adventures in a world that has long since dispensed with them.

The elevator isn’t what I had hoped for. No huddling emigrants, no whimsically bearded road-prophets. Hardly anyone in fact, a couple of rich families and a handful of old people whose cataracts would most likely ruin the whole experience for them. There is no jolt as we depart, no crunch of machinery and no cheerful daydreams about what if something goes wrong. All you get is the carefully-plotted acceleration curve and the gradual, predictable sight of the jungle city below contracting out of sight. The landscape stays the same for longer than it seems like it should, just more and more jungle refocussing itself as the frame of reference swings outwards. The interesting part is when you first notice the absence of down, when it occurs to you that you’re actually travelling sideways, glued to the wall by the acceleration which you still haven’t really noticed. To your left is a planet, a concept which seems increasingly irrelevant as the journey goes on. To your right is something much more real. Gradually we trickle out into the place where moving in a straight line never brings you back to where you started, where the directions are decided by a computer display and not by the vicissitudes of gravity.

A rather bored computerised voice suggests that we begin to move towards the edge of the hemispherical floor we are standing on, as acceleration is fading out and spin will soon be taking over the holding-us-down duties. Another sensation that should be more interesting than it is, waching the passengers fan outwards following the slowly shifting light trails on the floor until we are all opposite someone else and have to look up to see their version of down. We’re not as heavy as we were with the acceleration but the change is so slow that you barely notice. A man to my left, insofar as I have a left in this rather foolish orientation, discovers the change in weight only when he tries to sip from his coffee cup. One of the old folks nudges another and relates a story about the first time he made that same mistake. Coffee man seems all too aware of the unsettling range of angles from which people are watching him try and suck the coffee fom his tie.

At the top our own spin is timed to perfection as we slot into the doughnut hole in the spinning satellite. You have to climb out through the floor of course, down a narrow ladder, and this time you do feel the gravity lurch back up towards the normal Earth level. You don’t notice that the whole thing is spinning, there’s no room in the departure pod for windows. The ship is there waiting. Passes are scanned, irises are scanned, minor arguments erupt over contact lenses, coffee in more cleverly designed receptacles is acquired from the vending machine, and then it’s down another poky little ladder tunnel onto the Montpellier II. The Montpellier is as classless a vessel as I had hoped it would be, and the enjoyment of it is spoiled even more by the now unpleasant spin-gravity level this far out from the hub of the satellite complex. This is what I came for, the grimy seats and the awkward low ceiling. The tiny little window fogged with the slime from a thousand curious children’s noses. The other passengers wrestle with their luggage, each item topped up with bricks since we left the elevator, and curse the absurdly narrow storage bins and their tempremental door catches. I only have what fits in my pocket, as the wife is taking all my stuff through the warp gate. A minor punishment for her refusal to join me on the long way round, as if that wretched nausea wasn’t punishment enough. If you’ve ever smoked ten cigarettes before breakfast then hit yourself on the temple with a cupboard door while falling off a skateboard then you’ll know everything you need to about the joys of warp gate travel. I do admire the theatrics of it though, that ridiculous setup whereby you jump into a hole in the floor and another hole spits you out of the wall somewhere else. Something to do with transfer velocity apparently, but I suspect that the inventors simply had an evil sense of humour. In all of human existence there are few greater joys than watching people tumble out of warp gates. Presidents, empire builders, leaders of men; they’re all made to look like utter twats. And the more goons they have waiting to catch them, the more people there are to look on and snigger. Seat straps on. Big bloke in a jumpsuit passes by to wrench them tighter. If he only had a rollie in his mouth we might be at the funfair. Finally the satisfying scrape of the spacecraft and the elevator hub parting company, then the slithering decay of the spin-gravity as our trajectory levels out. Coffee man is now glad of his coffee-tie, as it appears to function just as well in zero gravity.

The journey is incredibly boring. My attempts to engage the other passengers in a singalong fare about as well as did the first three space elevators;
“Fly me to the moon and let me…”
“Fuck off!”
Someone lights a cigarette. You’re not allowed to smoke but there’s no crew besides the two men in the cockpit, and thankfully they are busy. The smoke looks more beautiful than the curling, shrivelling horizon we saw from the elevator. A child toys idly with globules of his own spit. A little spaceship icon on a little screen sits between the Earth and the Moon and moves tectonically along it’s simplified, dotted-line path.

“Holiday is it mate? You’ve not brought much with you,” someone asks.
“Research trip.”
“Oh yeah, what are you researching then?”
“The moon,” I tell him. My tone is lost on him. He actually seems surprised, more interested now if anything.
“Trying to figure out what it’s made of eh?”
“No, it’s made of rock. We know that already. I’m trying to figure out where it is.”
“Well hopefully the pilots know that already.”
“Not exactly they don’t, they don’t know where it is in enough dimensions for my purposes. If we take the right measurements we should be able to trace it backwards through time and figure out how it was formed, and maybe how its trajectory through space influences phenomena such as tidal locking and orbital irregularities,” I explain. Job done, he’s lost interest.
“Sounds fun,” he grumbles, before turning away to examine a fascinating lump of nothing that’s just caught his eye. I would try and explain properly what my research involves, but to be honest I really don’t know. I know how to set up the machine, but it’s the physics types who know what it does and why it needs to do it. I just built the fucking thing, engineers as usual bailing out the ‘real’ scientists who more often than not can’t make toast without written instructions. They definitely couldn’t make this spaceship, although looking around me I’m not sure that that isn’t a point in their favour.

I lose the will to live. Forty-five minutes later we land at Quantum City. None of the passengers can resist taking a few big leaps as we step out of the claustrophobic coffin of the Montpellier II and into the big steel bubble of the hangar. Infinitely prettier spacecraft glisten smugly at us as we wobble towards the reception gate. More irises are scanned to make sure nobody has changed their eyeballs since the elevator hub. A phalanx of important-looking uniformed types appears from beyond the reception gate. After a few abortive attempts to walk towards us in a menacing fashion, they decide to stay put and wait for us to come to them. They seem to be carrying tasers in a complex with metal walls which doesn’t seem like a very good idea.
“Professor David Ross?” the head uniform type asks everyone in turn. I consider just putting my hand up and admitting it’s me but the lad seems to be having such fun booming at everyone that I haven’t the heart. This is proper travel; constant hassle. Unpleasant surprises. And I nearly took the fucking gate as well, the wife wanted me to. Happily my project manager insisted I go the old fashioned way, paid for the ticket through the department and everything. He’s clearly married himself, he must know how good it feels to have an excuse to defy your wife for once.
“Professor David Ross?” The uniform finally gets to me.
“That’s me. Didn’t realise they did cavity searches at moon customs.”
“This is not the time for jokes Professor, the complex governor needs you at the warp terminal immediately.”
“I expect my wife is causing a fuss about something. After you, please.”
I follow the men into the city complex, trying not to bounce too much as I go. The other passengers look rather upset that I’ve bypassed the queue for the check-in scanners, and I get a special kind of scowl that’s clearly reserved only for class traitors.

“What was in your luggage Professor Ross?”
There are no niceties here. In fact the governor looks not long out of bed. His weighted boots allow him to pace back and forth with an appropriate level of gravitas. The warp gate glows ominously behind him. Computer terminals crackle and smoulder in a way they really shouldn’t. A single sprinkler urinates feebly onto a corner of the room with nothing in it.
“I didn’t have any. All I have is my car keys, which I probably don’t need, and some chewing gum.”
“I understand you sent luggage ahead with your wife, what was in there?”
“Is she here? Is she in a cell somewhere by any chance? She so often is.”
“Your wife is…around somewhere. It’s very important you tell me exactly what you had in your luggage.”
“Ordinary things, clothes, books. A few spare parts they sent me with, stuff for the big accelerator you have out here.”
“What parts specifcally? They must have been things we can’t make up here in our own labs.”
“There were some trip coils, fairly basic but you need full gravity to get the alignment right. Other than that there was a couple of mirrorfoam plates…”
“Shit. That’ll be it, the mirrorfoam.”
“What’ll be it? That’ll be what?”
“Your luggage caused a problem with the warp gate.”
“What sort of problem?”
“They call it feedback. Mirrorfoam plates, if you line them up in a certain way, can make a sort of warp interface when subjected to strong electrical fields. Basically a tiny version of the big warp link we have to Earth, and it only lasts for microseconds, but it’s unfocussed. The plates refract the interface but don’t contain it. Ordinarily the whole thing collapses straight away and all you have is two very broken bits of mirrorfoam, but if you somehow get both sides of the interface on either side of a warp gate, the whole thing starts to spiral out of control. It’s only ever been a theory up until now, one of those ‘theoretically possible in the sense that everything is theoretically possible’ things, black holes from supercolliders sort of stuff.”
“So what actually happened?”
“Well we’re still not sure. Whatever happened roasted a lot of circuits, including communication stuff that we need to talk to Earth. It also, well it sort of disintegrated your luggage.”
“All of it?”
“And your wife.”
“All of her?”
“Only most of her I’m afraid. Her left hand was still on the other side of the gate when the feedback loop collapsed, it managed to get through unharmed under it’s own momentum.”
“Fuck.”
“I’m terribly sorry. We put what we could find through the mass spectrometer and it certainly looks human.”
“I’ve got it!” a young man yelled from behind a computer screen in a corner of the room.
“Got what?” the governor asked, clearly glad of the opportunity to stop talking to me about my vapourised wife.
“Earth,” the voice called out.
“Good man, put them on speakers would you,”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that sir, I’ve found Earth but not on the radio. It’s on the video feed sir. That is, the cloud of dust where it used to be is on the video screen,” he said, his voice trembling to a halt as he realised what he’d just said.
“The Earth is gone?”
“Yes sir, and I wish that was the worst of it sir.”
“The Earth is gone and that’s not the worst of it?”
“No sir. There are over twenty thousand people in Quantum City alone, almost half a million moonwide.”
“Well that’s good isn’t it? We’ve still got some sort of human race left at least.”
“Yes sir, but you see the feedback system would have destroyed the planet in under a second. Most of the mass of the Earth was dismantled back down into energy and transported off to random parts of the galaxy through the warp folds.”
“Why didn’t it destroy the moon as well?”
“Just the angle of the warp field alignment I think. Their gate was in the floor, ours is in the wall. Different transfer velocities you see.”
“Never mind that, mass of the Earth…”
“Yes sir, well it’s all gone. So there’s nothing holding the moon in its proper orbit any more. So we’re going to fall into the sun.”
“I see. Anything we can do?”
“No sir. There’s room on the spacecraft we’ve got in dock for less than 1% of the moon’s population, and there’s nowhere for them to go anyway.”
“Fuck,” the governor says, with heartbreaking sincerity.
“Fuck,” I add, feeling rather outdone by the enormity of it all.

This is, it has to be said, quite a party. We’ve got about four hours before the air is replaced by helium and we all quietly die; consensus decided that would be preferable to everyone slowly roasting to death in the sunshine. The governor opted not to tell anyone about my involvement in the destruction of the human race, he just said it was a tragic accident and hinted that it was a blunder on the Earth side of the gate that did it. People seem to be genuinely happy, and not just because all alcohol rationing has been lifted and none of the people fucking in the corridors need to worry about protection; in four hours absolutely nothing will matter any more, or ever again. I of all people should probably feel pretty terrible, but I don’t. Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later, well perhaps not exactly like this. In all probability humanity’s end would have been infinitely more protracted and painful than it turns out to be, and I at least can say that I enjoyed my life. I always travelled the long way round so I could see more of everything. I always did things the hard way, but still it’s oddly nice to give people an easy way out.