Squid Ink Incorporated

‘Smoke some more fags’ my colleague urges me, ‘the ash makes it burn slower’.

My colleague and I are smoking z grade crack from a pipe fashioned out of a plastic coke bottle and a foil kit kat wrapper.

We are holed up in a cheap hotel in the crappy end of Kings Cross. Our crack smoking is interspersed with cheap booze, plus copious amounts of fags, joints and the occasional blackout.

It hasn’t always been this way, only a few years ago my colleague and I were in the peak of physical and mental fitness. We were corporate astronauts on a sponsored mission to Phobos. Hailed as the last true pioneers, explorers into the furthest reaches of space, heroes. That was until that whole thing.

As I start to remember the events that led us here I quickly down half a can of syrupy lager. Sensing my pain, my colleague hastily skins up.

Down on the street below the sound of the mob grows louder, jeers, the roar of flame, policemen shouting through megaphones, trying in vain to control the murderous masses.

‘Turn the TV up again’ suggests my colleague; shuffling over to the portable, I spin the volume knob as high as it will go.

The repeat of the comedy panel show we had been watching is interrupted by a news flash, we see our photos on the screen, shots of the mob outside.

The newscaster recaps the history of our mission, the launch attended by thousands of cheering people, our sponsors eagerly telling viewers that we are the pride of the nation. As the newscaster goes on to retell of our misfortune on Phobos, his face drops into a scowl.

‘Turn this shit over’ mutters my colleague, ‘and pass us the stuff’.

My colleague loads the pipe while outside the noise grows louder. I hear windows breaking downstairs, the police had lost the battle, or just given up, the mob were now entering the building.

‘Fuck it mate anyone can make a mistake right?’ says my colleague exhaling a lungful of smoke. ‘Here, try not to think about that whole thing’.

I smoke in rapid bursts, coughing hard, a deep bark that makes my eyes water. Regardless I smoke more, we had been abusing ourselves like this for about two months now, ever since we returned. A desperate bid to try to quell the nausea we had felt since the breakout, the breakout that we had inadvertently caused.

I toke deeply, holding the smoke in my lungs for as long as I can. Perhaps when the mob get here the narcotics might deaden the pain of a thousand angry Londoners beating the living crap out of us.

If only we hadn’t if only we had gone East instead of West, not found that box, not brought it back with us, not caused the…

‘Don’t, don’t think about it Ad, we couldn’t have known, it’s just one of things… shit happens mate’. My colleague snaps me out of the sickening spiral of thoughts that have looped endlessly around my head ever since we opened the box.

The voices grow louder now, I can hear footsteps thumping up the stairs, soon the room door will burst open, the mob will flood in. Any minute now the vengeance of many will descend upon us.

‘I think were out of fags Ad’.

Shit happens.

In deep space redundancy is a matter of life and death. The Corporation had issued a bombshell missive in regard to the fiscal downturn currently being experienced back on Earth.

Due to the current climate we have been forced to make some difficult decisions about the feasibility of the Phobos monolith mission. After careful consideration we have come to the painful conclusion that we will have to make some of our posts redundant. We are deeply sorry that it has come to this, however as I am sure you are aware we are in midst of a universal recession and unfortunately we will have to adapt our business practices if the corporation is to survive. We do hope that you understand that the choices we have had to make have been difficult and that your families will be compensated by a redundancy payment at the universal statutory rate.

I guess they meant that whole thing about difficult choices and the missive seemed sincere.

‘Old Silverback’ our line manger called us all into the canteen; I swear he had lost some hair overnight with the stress.

The strain showed on the faces of the crew, the usually raucous atmosphere replaced with a sullen air of fear and desperation. Chinese whispers drifted cruelly across the room turning the artificial air into a dense fog of paranoia and accusation.

‘Old Silverback’ had just finished a conference call with the board when he floated uncomfortably into the room.

‘There ain’t no good way to say this so I’m just going to get on with it, the corporation has made five of our posts redundant’.

The unspoken malaise in the room grumbled into audibility.

‘It’s not right I know, but the corporation has promised to make full redundancy payment at statutory rate’.

The room erupted into a fit of bitching and moaning, ‘Old Silverback’ waited patiently for the mumbling to die down. ‘The corporation has left it up to us as to who to cut, I can’t see any other way of doing it ‘cept democratically, Nate, bring in the sticks’.

Boson Nathan Green floated in from the kitchen holding a vacuum jar filled with chopsticks.

The crew instinctively knew what would happen next, without speaking they unclipped themselves from the canteen benches and drifted into a single file line leading up to the boson. Each in turn taking a chopstick from the vacuum jar.

‘Old Silverback’ drew the last of the chopsticks and counted down from five. The crew held their sticks up at the end of the count. Each and everyone of them held their breath until they had surveyed the room, studiously comparing the length of their ‘straw’ to the others.

The five holders of the shortest sticks wept, hugged their friends, said a prayer and moved toward the airlock. ‘Old Silverback’ himself was one of the five; he led them in a dignified silence.

Despite the initial uproar, they had all known the risks. The promise of a lifetimes pay for a ten year mission, they had all been briefed on the contract terms. At least this way their families would be catered for, even if it was only at the statutory rate.

* In the boardroom back on Earth, the directors watched the unlucky five being catapulted into the inky blackness of space.

‘Well that went well don’t you think?’ the MD asked the executive directors.

‘Yes I think so, the savings we made will continue to maximise our profit margin’ replied the financial director.

‘Do you think they realised?’ the operations director asked.

‘How could they know we hadn’t budgeted for the full journeys resources? I am sure they bought that whole recession spiel’ the MD asserted. ‘How do you think they will take the news that there will be only enough fuel to bring two of them back with the monolith?’

‘They’re contractors, if they don’t like it we aren’t legally liable to give a shit’ replied the HR director.

‘That’s what I pay you for’ smiled the MD.

I have a confession to make; I collect science fiction novels.

My obsession began around five years ago when my friend demanded I read Philip K Dick’s ‘Time out of Joint’. From then on I was well and truly hooked, my conscious floating deep somewhere within the universes of Messer’s Banks, Harrison and Lem. A constantly changing SF Masterworks cover had appeared where my face once was.

Sci-fi itself was nothing new to me; my childhood memories are punctuated by ‘2000AD’, ‘Planet of the Apes’, ‘Logan’s Run’, and Disney’s ‘Black Hole’. But my lifelong fascination was polarized when, after moving house aged 10, I inherited a left behind copy of ‘Spacewreck’. A glossy hard cover of crashed space ship illustrations, each image suggesting a wealth of untold narrative, which is forever etched onto my imagination.

It is perhaps due to the hours spent endlessly thumbing through my copy of ‘Spacewreck’ that I have always enjoyed eagerly browsing the crates of sci-fi novels that sat outside the second hand bookshops in Charing Cross. Each book preceded by the sometimes surreal – sometimes cheesy images, which suggest a narrative often more engaging than that which lay beyond the cover.

The Amazon sponsored credit card bill that had resulted from my new fiction addiction, had now given me a legitimate excuse for taking home a handful of these dog-eared curios.

Like all good acquisitive hobbies, my sci-fi novel collection has mutated into a fairly un-healthy obsession. Now the second hand bookshop is a mandatory part of each and every excursion, shopping trip and even holiday.

I have developed a set of terminal collector’s symptoms, cold sweats, racing pulse and excessive salivation now occurs on contact with the second hand book emporium. I have even worked up a system for my crate rifling. First running through the author’s names to pick out any of the highly prized items – the endless back catalogues of Pohl and Harrison or anything by the Strugatsky Brothers (my current holy grail). Then picking books by age, publisher and finally randomly browsing the selection by grabbing a handful at a time and shuffling through them like a deck of cards.

Ideally there should be a fusion of both intriguing story and fantastic cover. But the ‘cover is king’ and quite often just a wild image and back cover synopsis to suit is enough for it to become part of my home dominating library.

Recently I was lucky enough to go for a holiday in Vancouver, where my
understanding girlfriend, (herself partial to the odd Harrison or Wyndham), allowed me to hijack a few days of our precious holiday in search of second hand bookshops.

Oh, and I found some. This is a shot of the sci-fi section of ‘pulp fiction books‘ in
Vancouver, just one of a number of the number of treasure troves I found while I was there.

You will have to excuse the shaky focus, that’s me quaking with excitement.

Cutting to the chase, here are some of the books I picked up both in Vancouver and in my more recent bank holiday trip to (the slightly less exotic) Kent Coast, which have got my heart pounding. These covers and tag lines also tie in quite neatly with some of my current sf writing obsessions…

‘Joymakers’ by James Gunn

Pleasure was the hedonists business. Hedonics Inc., started small. All you had to do was dial P-L-E-A-S-U-R-E. Then everybody wanted it.

‘Lathe of Heaven’ by Ursula Le Guin

George must dream and dream again, forever seeking utopia, until the fabric of the existence must itself collapse…

Skylark of Space by E.E. Doc Smith

With his cold intelligence and the backing of a giant industrial combine, DeQuense and three others – two of them women – were marooned, countless light years from Earth, with only one chance in a million of ever returning…

Fourth Mansions by R.A Rafferty

a weird over-view of reality, in a story of:

Seven very special people blending to create a higher form of humanity;

A laughing man living alone on a mountaintop, guarding the world;

The returnees, men who live again and again, century after century;

A dog – ape plappergeist who can be seen only from the corner of an eye.

Spending my waking life in front of a computer combined with being a habitual mistake-ist made the undo button my best friend, no, my lover, no, my soulmate. No, undo.

I could not comprehend my existence without the ability to instantly rectify disastrous computing errors via the click of a mouse or the punch of two simultaneous keys.

Ctrl+Z.

I lived and died by the undo function, it saved my life more times than… undo.

So prolific was my use of the curly blue arrow, I found myself reaching for it in physical and social situations. My fingers floundering to find the invisible shortcut icon, to take back that bad choice, fix that broken plate. To be able to physically revert back to the moment prior to my mistake, to have looked after I leap.

I trawled the web like a furtive scholar in a gothic fiction, a sweaty Lovecraftian protagonist in a tireless search of secret knowledge. A search to obtain the power to undo. Google became my ancient leather bound library of alchemy, spells and science. After many sleepless nights I found what I sought, mystical circuit diagrams for machines to enable entry into parallel universes. Access to simultaneous existences where infinite possibilities of choice become corporeal.

The commissioning of my machine could not have come at a better time. One too many drinks after work and harboured secrets gushed out of my drunken mouth before conscious thought could kick in.

With one click of my virtual Ctrl+Z I was spared a night of sleepless paranoia.

The next day, my hangover inspired orgy of error, which would have otherwise caused a major professional malfunction…. soon null and void thanks to the my possibility flexing friend.

Undo

So reliable was my radionics powered undo engine, that I felt comfortable enough to purposely commit gross faux pas. I spoke my mind to figures of authority, spilt drinks on people who bored me and generally committed random acts of wanton negligence. It became a sport for me, I pushed new boundaries in the art of error.

Undo, undo, undo, undo, undo, undo.

Have you ever made a series of computational entries only to realise that they were in error? Felt the need to retrace your steps back, back, back until suddenly you can go no further? I have done this many times, experienced that sinking feeling, the point of no return, so many steps back until suddenly being unable to go no further. That terrifying moment, desperately clicking my mouse, sending toolbars into chaos and disarray. Sadly for me, such moments I had forgotten when designing my machine.

By replicating the exact conditions of the function, limitations and all, I soon found myself repeatedly hitting my virtual blue arrow until my machine froze and finally crashed.

Now each of my anti-social, business wrecking, intentional mistakes act out their unstoppable repercussions.

Desperately I flounder, reaching for that blue arrow, only to find it greyed out, an error message repeatedly flashing – can’t undo.

We hadn’t heard from Adam for weeks. I know he gets caught up with work, they like to keep him busy. But he’s almost always up for a beer at least one night a week.

We know he had a new phone that he was moaning about not being able to use, that’s probably why he never replied to my texts. He usually answers his emails though, maybe he forgot his password again, they’re all about a thousand letters long.

The thing that really worried us was his tweet ‘really not happy with the way things are, can’t carry on this way’.

We made a load of pissed phone calls to him from the pub that night to try and force him to come down the pub. When he didn’t answer Dave came up with the idea of breaking into his flat, we were convinced that he was going to top himself or something.

The back window was open, so we gave Dave a bunk-up, when he got inside he let us in the front door.

At this point we realised that if we had broken in while he was in bed with his girlfriend or something we’d all feel pretty stupid. But he’d do the same for us if he was worried right? As it was, there was no-one in.

Looking around we found a stack of stuff lying on his desk. In our heads we’d geared ourselves up to find a suicide note or maybe a plane ticket to Mongolia or something, instead we found these:

A copy of a book called The Joymakers by James E. Gunn
A print of some dodgy web article – freaky-physics-proves-parallel-universes
A print of a wikipedia page about a cosmonaut called Sergei Avdeyev
Another print out off the web for something called the ‘Etheric Portal Plus Supreme’
A receipt from a fancy dress store with ‘astronaut’ written on it,
A post-it with ‘initiated by sunlight’ written in red biro.

We took the stuff we found home and made some strong coffee, we sat going trying to make sense of it until the sun came up. Then we went for a walk along the Romford beaches, the weather was proper nice, really sunny but with a breeze coming in off the sea.

It wasn’t till midday that Me, Dave and Karen realised that not only had none of us remembered to go to work, but none of us had got any shitty phone calls asking us why we hadn’t turned up.

We went to the little cafe on the beachfront, we had a decent fry-up and they forgot to charge us for it, touch! After that we went for a swim and slept all afternoon.

It was pretty weird of Adam to disappear like that and we were all well vexed about all that funny shit we found on his desk.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember there being any beaches in Romford yesterday.

My scifi flash ‘a girl in every port’ has been published on 365tommorrows – http://tiny.cc/kewse I have also entered this as my #Fridayflash if you want to comment please do here.

The ‘bots are uploading gossip about me. This time they’re going to send an error report to my line manager , I know it.

Ok so the terraform was my project, I admit that maybe I could of made a better job of it, kept my eye on the ball. Maybe they’re right, I did fail to co-ordinate between contractors, but you can’t do everything right?

The project started well, on programme, on budget and the client was pleased as punch with our work, it was just a little oversight on my part, no biggie.

The spec was simple and I followed it nearly to the letter, oceans, continents, a balance between habitable land and wilder areas to encourage diversity. It was pretty much to terraform standard, just a few variations.

Ok so I got some of the colour schemes wrong, but, I will say the purple deserts were quite attractive, I don’t care what those anal colour ‘bots say, I really don’t.

The real problem was the cleaners, they were supposed to come in and remove any unwanted residue, dangerous foliage, unstable tectonics, former inhabitants, that sort of thing. I had booked them to come in before we started; it’s not my fault they hadn’t turned up.

That’s the problem of employing cheap human labour to do ‘bots work. What was I supposed to do? We had milestones to meet, performance indicators, graphs on the wall and all that, I had to push the job through.

The engineering consultant was pretty unfair in what he said I think, yeah so there are a few dead bodies here and there, so a few robot teams never made it back. All things considered, it could of been worse, we haven’t populated yet.

Who would of known how the terraforming process would affect those little critters like it did. They were an un-evolved species; they even looked cute before they got caught up in the processing, it could of gone either way.

Seriously I wouldn’t of thought those critters could cause so much trouble, wrecking the machines, destroying the landscaping ‘bots, even killing the armed security squad I sent in, I mean, seriously no-one could of known that.

I will sort it out before the population lands though. I’ve got a good couple of hours left and I’ve hired a flame-thrower from facilities.

I will make good my mistakes, I always do. Give it six weeks or so it will all be water under the bridge, again.

Flame on!

The kids are playing with their ray guns again, running around the house in noisy circles. This weeks noises are a series of short, sharp ‘pi-hews’, replacing last weeks ‘doo- doo-doos’.

‘What are you shooting at?’

‘Invaders Dad, they’re called the Gak’ is the answer I’m given, complete with an unspoken ‘obviously!’

Reluctantly I think to myself, Tam was right, she said we shouldn’t have given the kids guns. Well, at least it’s better than the lightsabers, I had visions of them prizing each others eyes out with those things.

I can’t help thinking though, Max looks a little subdued, ‘What’s up doc?’

‘We’re loosing’, he said somewhat downcast, ‘we tried to rally them on the stairs, but they got the better of us, we lost the ground we made earlier this week. Another few stairs and they’ll be in the hall’.

‘It’ll be alright tiger, how about an ambush? You could hide in the cupboard under the stairs, pop out and shoot them through the bannisters’.

Max considered this, then briefed his sister, their faces stoic, serious beyond their years. ‘That’s it!’ exclaimed Polly, ‘We could slaughter them!’ She takes after her Mother that way.

That night when I (finally) got back from work, the kids looked exhausted, they were stroppy with us and bickering with each other, all the usual signs of being over-tired.

I put them to bed early in an effort to sustain peace. As I tuck them in, Max asks me, in deadly earnest, ‘Dad, is it wrong to kill? even if those you kill, well, even if they’re bad?’

‘It’s always wrong to kill Max, even if the people are bad’ (In the moral spotlight now, gotta perform). ‘Even if people do bad things, you shouldn’t kill them, you should be forgiving, understanding’.

‘What if they wanted to hurt a lot of people though? What if they wanted to enslave everyone, us, you and Mum, if we had a chance to kill them all, wipe them out, shouldn’t we do it?’

Sometimes the kids scare me with their sincerity, where did they get a word like ‘enslave’ from?

‘You should always try to understand other people’s point of view, even if it doesn’t seem right’ (There, that’s good Fatherly advice, isn’t it?).

‘Hmm, ok Dad’.

With that I was off the hook and off to the fridge for a well earned beer or two, as I walked downstairs I could hear the two of them mumbling to each other.

That morning, Max and Polly were waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, ‘Are you sure Dad? About what you said last night?’ Polly asked.

‘Yes, of course, we should all be understanding, being understanding and forgiving is what makes the world a better place’. (Nice, there’s a philosophy we can all benefit from, wise words from the father figure, high five!).

Max looked at Polly, Polly at Max, ‘Ok Dad, if your sure’.

‘Sure I’m sure’.

I returned home from work that evening to find Max and Polly, my children, in chains at the foot of our stairs. They had been condemned to slavery, this I soon learned was the first decree of the Great Gak. Considering the genocide my daughter had planned for them, I guess it could have been worse.

Despite our rational protestations and our subsequent irrational escape attempts, Tam and I were clapped in irons at the wrong end of a long spear.

Some painful and gruelling weeks later, the two of us, exhausted beyond description, are chained to a work gang in Crystal Palace. Barbed Gak whips crack around our heads as we are forced to shunt vast pyramid building blocks across South London, forced to construct a pyramid in honour of the Great Gak. This was the second decree of the Great Gak, the leader of the invading alien forces that had arrived through a portal at the top of our stairs. The same invading alien forces who could have been scared off on their arrival by two fierce looking children with plastic ray guns.

As the chains bite into my skin, continually drawing blood and the weight of the huge stone block breaks my back, I think to myself… I really should keep my big mouth shut.

I finally have to admit it to myself, the job that started out as a stopgap has become my career by default. I can still remember my interview.

‘So Miss Mercer, where do you see yourself in five years time?’

Myoko my flatmate, as volatile as the volcano that was her namesake, demanded that I find employment or else lose my overpriced and undersized laminate floored bedsit. Reluctantly forcing myself out of months of dope inspired agoraphobia and daytime tv addiction, I squeezed on my court shoes, printed out my wildly exaggerated cv and hit the  agencies.

Settling for a position (well I say settling, I was hardly flooded with opportunity) with DeAth, DeAth & Quim Holdings, I was assigned a number of ‘administrative’ duties. That is to say, tea making, filing, scanning and the occasional brush with the executive washroom.

Some months into my job I had progressed to data entry, I was a mouse jockey, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v, ctrl c, ctrl v….

I would console myself with the mantra ‘Everybody’s got to make a living’, like the sample in that old eight-ball garage tune. But the slow and systematic mental abuse of sheer mundanity had begun to take hold. Where did I see myself in five years? Not still here that’s for sure.

Two years in, every day the same now, project upon project, deadline upon deadline, every one seemingly the same. The mad rush to submit on time and the hollow feeling you get in your gut when you realise that no-one will ever read that report you stayed late all week to finish.

By now I had surpassed the early days of employer suspicion, internet use monitoring and  wristwatch tapping after fag breaks. As vocationally unskilled as I was, I had tentatively carved myself a niche, a position of trust.

Three years in, I had responsibility, my own staff, workers, duped by their own belief that this was only a stopgap while they worked out ‘what they wanted to do when they grew up’, suckers!

It was during the fourth year of my internment, the long and repetitive days stretching eternally before me, that I had my epiphany.

In a moment of insufferable boredom and unrelenting fatigue I tore my right eye out with a staple remover. As the blood seeped between the qwerty letters on my keyboard, the intensity of my pain brought about a new clarity to my career development. I began to take an active interest in the company, attending board meetings, reading stock reports and studying investment performance. From my escalated position I set up some investments on my own initiative, insolvency buy outs, sponsored celebrity breast augmentations, arms dealing and the odd coups d’etat, the bloodier the better.

Five years in, I sit at the head of a boardroom table carved from virgin Amazonian timber, in a chair fashioned from whalebone and ivory. Human skull paperweights sit atop piles of unpaid vat and corporation tax bills. My staff have developed into a crack team of corporate cut-throats, ruled under my iron fist. No-one fucks with the bitch with the eye patch! Least of all the former Company owners DeAth, DeAth and Quim, who were given a buyout offer they simply couldn’t refuse.

Ask me again where I see myself in five years time, go on! I have a five year business plan in place now. Phase one, the the purchase of worthless deep space real estate. Phase two involves my private army of mercenaries, armed to the teeth and stationed at key strategic points throughout the world. A few governmental takeovers later and bam! The subsequent inter-continental wars that I have programmed will ensure that the worthless rock I own on Mars and Titan will become prime, radiation free habitat.

Give it another five years who knows?

The house of math is lined with blackboards; from outside I can hear the tipetty-tap-tap of chalk on hard, cold surfaces, occasionally a protracted slide, the product of a multiplication problem underlined in one smooth stroke.

I can almost see the white dust hanging in the air, the stained fingertips, the length of chalk growing smaller and smaller till fingers scratch the surface of the board.

Escape is easy, if you know how, calculate the position where the window should be, the co-ordinates of how high up one is in the building, the probability of surviving the jump to the ground below.

Perhaps you could calculate the odds of being rescued, 6:1, 13:1, 23:1, 100:1, tippety tap tippetty tap.
If those calculations are unworkable, perhaps you could appraise the force required to weaken the structure? create a fissure, compute the stress and strain, what force is needed to fracture the walls that bind you?

Tipetty-tap-tap… tipetty-tap-tap

What is your margin of error?

What is your escape velocity?

How long is infinity?

Tipetty-tap-tap… tipetty-tap-tap-tap.

The house of math is my house; at this precise moment in time I have a man trapped inside there. This is what I enjoy, ‘how I get my kicks’, especially when that man has Dyscalculia.