“Don’t have anything to –?” I exclaimed. I may have sounded a little hysterical. It wouldn’t surprise me if I had. “Have you been reading the headlines?”
“I mean this,” Maggie said patiently, giving the edge of her electronic clipboard a tap with the stylus. “I was talking about this. Not the Incident.”
A true professional. Everyone else was calling it Armageddon. Apocalypse. The End Of Days. The Slow Extinction. The Terminal Fuck-up. Only a public sector employee could calmly refer to it by its official designation, the Incident, and not add an eye roll or an ironic grimace.
“Martin, you see,” she went on, “is a very interesting young man. He has certain... qualities. I need to know as much as I can about him. Whatever you can tell me, anything at all, will be very helpful.”
What was there to say? What, that she couldn’t already have known? Asperger’s syndrome. High-functioning autism. Near the upper end of the spectrum. Incredibly smart. Incredibly unemotional. Like a robot in many ways. His brain working at unimaginable speeds. His heart aloof, unknowable. Impenetrable.
That was Martin.
I
N OTHER WORDS
, they’ve selected the geeks. The nerds. The boffins. Not the prime physical specimens. The trolls who live in their parents’ basements. The screen jockeys with the spaghetti limbs and cathode tans. The boys who could never get the girls, the girls who repel the boys. Total space cadets. The future of the human race is in their baby-soft hands. Pardon me while I puke. Why not football players? Farmers? Construction workers? Carpenters? Cops? People with some experience of life. Tough, physical people who know what pain and hard work is. It wasn’t accountants or – or – or shut-ins who colonised the American West, was it? It was pioneers, outdoorsmen, cattle ranchers, rugged frontier folk. This is a disaster in the making. This has EPIC FAIL written all over it. As if we haven’t screwed up badly enough already, we’ve got to go for the double.
T
HE LIMO CRUISED
towards Heathrow. It felt, weirdly, like going on holiday. Me, Claire, Martin and his sister Jenny, all in one car, heading for the airport. Incongruously normal. A trip to Spain, maybe, or Greece. Except there was no sense of urgency or expectation, no fear that we might arrive late and miss the plane.
The roads were more or less empty. People didn’t travel much these days. Didn’t go anywhere. Would rather stay at home. In the first few months after the Incident, everyone went everywhere. Governments poured money into subsidising aviation fuel, airlines dropped their seat prices to rock bottom, and we all become globetrotters and jetsetters. Crossing those must-see destinations off our bucket lists. The Taj Mahal. Ayers Rock. The Great Wall. The Pyramids. But then, in time, the novelty wore off. That weird sense of exhilaration died. Dull mundanity set in again. We turned into hermits, favouring the familiar over the strange, the known over the unknown, friends over foreigners, people over places.
Conversation in the limo was stilted. Claire kept trying not to cry. She had vowed not to make a scene, for Martin’s sake. Outpourings of sadness or affection made him uncomfortable. He would actively squirm.
Finally, to combat the awkward silence, Jenny switched on the in-car TV. A news channel came up. There it was, a satellite shot of the Incident site. Facts and figures scrolled along the bottom. Width of site: now standing at 798.7 miles in diameter. Expansion rate: constant at a mile a day. Estimated number of ecophages: almost uncountable – a sextillion and rising.
A jet black stain on the ocean, like an immense ink blot. Widening. Encroaching. Spreading outwards and downwards ravenously, insatiably. A tumour on the planet, metastasising like mad.
The story switched to the trial of the eco-terrorist group responsible. For weeks the hearings had dragged on, bogged down in legal technicalities and fine print. The International Court was deliberating whether to prosecute the ten men and women for crimes against humanity, genocide, mass murder, or simply for industrial sabotage and destruction of property. Since nobody had died yet as a direct consequence of the Incident, it was all a bit moot. Besides, what punishment was there that could possibly fit the crime? Meanwhile, outside the Peace Palace in the Hague, thousands of protestors were baying for the culprits’ heads. Placards read HANG THEM ALL and JUSTICE FOR HUMANITY.
Martin appeared oblivious. He sat with his head canted against the window, gazing out. Perhaps he was counting lampposts. Or establishing the limo’s speed from the rate at which the road markings flickered by. Or logging the number of windows in every house we passed so as to be able to produce an average at the end of the journey. Any of those.
T
HAT LAST CONTRIBUTOR
, what bullshit. Who better to go than some of the brightest among us? We don’t need jocks up there, we need brainiacs. What they don’t have in terms of survival skills, they’ll pick up from
Pandora
’s tutorial programmes. They’ll arrive at the other end ready and capable to colonise their new home. Plus – and this is true because I read it in the
New Scientist
– people with autistic tendencies are ideal for space flight, especially one that’s going to last a decade and a half. They cope better with boredom. They can amuse themselves for long periods. They’re less likely to suffer claustrophobia or mental breakdown. Think of it this way. They’re
homo sapiens
to us Neanderthals. The way forward. The next step. Evolution has given them to us, and now we need them. So let’s use them.
I
REMEMBER WHEN
it first sank in – the news that the march of the von Neumann replicators could not be retarded or contained. They would just keep copying themselves, turning everything they touched into more of the same, for ever and ever.
It was supposed to be safe. The perfect way to clean up an oil spill. The BP supertanker
Tony Hayward
foundered in a mid-Atlantic storm, her hull was breached, her cargo began to leak out, and a plane was despatched to lob a canister of dedicated ecophages into the water. The nanotech machines were designed to eat crude oil, multiply, and then, when their work was done, disintegrate harmlessly, converting back into carbon and hydrogen. There would be no slick, no cordoned-off black beaches, no fish floating belly up, no seabirds tarred as well as feathered.
Only, someone had contaminated the replicators with a code virus that was triggered the moment they were activated. The automatic shutoff did not kick in. An oil-only diet would not suffice. The replicators had been transformed from short-lived, self-destructing monovores into relentlessly self-perpetuating omnivores.
Earth Abides, the extremist eco-activist group, proudly claimed responsibility on their website. Some guff about rampant fossil fuel usage. Pollution. Proving a point. Striking a blow.
More like scoring an own goal.
And we hoped, oh God we hoped, that the pundits’ direst prophecies would not come true. That someone would be able to put an end to it. That what human ingenuity had set in motion, human ingenuity would halt.
But time went by, the nanomachine cluster kept expanding, and everyone’s best efforts were in vain.
Even detonating a low-yield nuke at the site made no difference. The von Neumann replicators sucked up that thermal energy and thrived, like manmade molecular-scale cockroaches.
Slowly it dawned on us. This was Twilight Time. The nanomachines would not give up. They would eat on, reproduce wildly, until there was no Earth left, only them. A planet-sized ball of twinkling blackness, floating in space, adrift, lifeless. Nothing but that.
Accepting fate – a
fait accompli
– the governments of the world got together, pooled resources, and commissioned the building of
Pandora
. The International Spaceship
Pandora
. Furnished with nuclear pulse propulsion engines. Able to achieve something akin to light speed. Pointed at Gliese 581g, an extrasolar planet just inside the Goldilocks zone of a red dwarf star. A new Earth, habitable, with landmasses, oceans, atmosphere.
Sophisticated onboard systems would control navigation, waste recycling and life support.
But who should be the passengers?
I
T’S ALL A
front, a scam, this programme of recruiting the autistic. That’s just what we’re being told by the powers-that-be. Actually, all the places on board
Pandora
have been bagged by politicians, billionaires and their families. They’ve all cronied together and they’re going to bugger off and leave the rest of us poor sods behind to die. This is no conspiracy theory. It’s how it is. I have proof. They get the lifeboat, we all go down with the ship.
“D
AD
?”
“Yes, Martin?”
“You’ll feed Tyke after I’m gone?”
The cat. Tyke, short for Tycho. Named after Tycho Brahe, the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer, a hero of Martin’s.
“Of course,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
“Oh, I’m not worried. I’m just confirming. He likes his wet food in the morning, no later than seven, and his dry food in the evening, no later than six.”
“I know.”
“Sometimes you forget.”
“I’ll try not to.”
“Martin?” said Claire. I could tell she was about to say something she shouldn’t. Something that wouldn’t get her the answer she wanted. “Will you miss us? When you’re up there? Off in space?”
“I wish you were there to do my laundry,” Martin replied, having considered the question for barely a moment. “And to cook tuna bake for me. That’ll be a shame, not to have your tuna bake any more.”
I took Claire’s hand. Felt it tremble.
“There are worse things,” I said to her, trying for consolation. “Your tuna bake
is
very good.”
W
HO WOULD YOU
rather share a starship with? Kirk or Spock? That’s what it comes down to. Kirk will either beat up or shag everything in sight. Spock will actually get you where you want to go. It’s a no-brainer.
M
ARTIN WAS OUR
first kid, so we didn’t know any differently. We didn’t know that not all babies were as taciturn as he was, not all toddlers were so laser-focused on their play that they ignored the other children in the room, not all three-year-olds failed to respond to verbal or visual prompts and couldn’t meet your eye, not all youngsters were born so
old
. It wasn’t until Jenny came along that we realised how – for want of a better word – abnormal Martin was. Jenny did all the things the child-rearing manuals said were supposed to happen. She hit all her marks, a textbook baby, whereas Martin was an exception to every rule. He was formally diagnosed when he was five, statemented when he was eight. He could read like a demon but his handwriting was infantile. He could solve complex logic puzzles but found tying a shoelace a challenge. He could work a computer like a virtuoso pianist but not ride a bike. He was superior in so many ways, and in so many other ways inferior.
Sometimes he would look at me across the dinner table, or I would look at him, and I’d have no idea what was going on inside his head. There was no expression on his face, just a flat affect. His eyes seemed lost, deep in thought, but perhaps there was nothing going on behind them, just cogs whirring aimlessly, a humming blankness. Only Martin knew what he was thinking, but he rarely told us. Rarely let us in.
We got used to it, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that we were cursed, our family blighted somehow. A chance permutation of our combined DNA, Claire’s and mine, had let Martin down. We had created, between us, a hollow being, an emptiness that looked like a person, a living automaton. He could never interact with others on any meaningful level. He was destined to be eternally apart. He would not belong anywhere.
Little did we realise that we had, in fact, given birth to the future of the human race.
W
HAT’LL THEY DO
when they get there? They’ll need to get on with building shelters, sowing crops and mating – especially the last. But they’ll be too busy playing
World Of Warcraft
to “get busy”, tee hee hee
.
H
EATHROW NEARED.
T
HE
shuttles were going up from major airports all across the world simultaneously, a co-ordinated programme of launches to send a message to the inhabitants of this doomed ecosphere:
see them go, watch them ascend as one, weep if you must, but also rejoice
.
The shuttles were riding atop modified Boeing 747s, a piggyback ride to take them close to the stratosphere. Safer and surer than booster rockets, and simpler too. They would detach in flight, break through the ionosphere, then converge on the geostationary drydock where
Pandora
was berthed. Four hundred autistic youths would file through umbilicuses and airlocks onto a ship that looked not unlike a snowflake, a glorious confection of solar panels and habitat arms that would spin as it flew, its whirl generating artificial gravity. Fifteen years later they would touch down on Gliese 581g, fully grown now, physically mature, in the prime of life and ready to face the rigours of starting from scratch on strange soil under strange skies.
H
I
! J
OHNNY
N
IMBUS
here. You know I don’t like to butt in, but every so often people need reminding of the rules. Keep ’em clean, don’t be mean. That’s what it comes down to, Cloud Crowders.
J
ENNY DECIDED TO
annoy Martin. Because she liked to and could. One last go, for old times’ sake.