SHALL INHERIT

 

JAMES LOVEGROVE

 

Prolific author James Lovegrove’s most recent novels are Age of Aztec, latest in his bestselling Pantheon series, and Redlaw. He has written extensively for teenagers and younger children, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages and shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Society Award, and the Manchester Book Award. His “Carry The Moon In My Pocket” won the 2011 Seiun Award in Japan for Best Translated Short Story. James is a regular reviewer of fiction for the Financial Times and contributes frequently to the magazine Comic Heroes. He lives in Eastbourne with his wife, two sons and cat.

 

 

MORNING, CLOUD CROWD! It’s Johnny Nimbus, your AI network host, comin’ atcha with a streamcast of all your views, all your news, all the time. And the big topic of discussion today is – what else? – the launches. In a few short hours the crew of the IS Pandora will be getting hoicked up to near-Earth orbit to take their places aboard the super space ark that’s going to fly them to a galaxy far, far away, never to return. The forums are open, as ever, so get commenting and communing, tweeting and browbeating, ’cause without your thoughts there’s no show and without the show where will your thoughts go?

 

 

THE LIMO ARRIVED punctually at eight. Serene and black and unforgivably ostentatious. Everyone in the street would know who it was for, why it had come. Furtive curtains twitched. Brazen neighbours came out onto their front doorsteps and stared, arms folded.

I went upstairs to chivvy Martin out of his room. He was on his computer, piffling about on the internet. Astronomy sites and the like, as usual. Just as though it was any other morning, in no way a special or different day.

Special or different meant nothing to Martin.

“Time to go,” I said.

“Yeah.” He didn’t look round; didn’t move.

“Now.”

“Okay. Coming.”

“Really now. Not ‘soon’ now.”

“I said okay.”

Ten minutes later he deigned to descend. The limo driver had already put his suitcase in the boot. Martin had met the 20kg luggage allowance exactly, down to the gramme. He’d made an eclectic choice of belongings to take with him. A few of his favourite books, cherished physical copies. T-shirts with videogame characters on. A penny jar that accounted for nearly a fifth of the suitcase’s laden weight. A nightlight that he probably wouldn’t be able to plug in anywhere. A handful of Lego models and Warhammer figurines.

He had needed some persuading to include a framed photo of us, his family, and the Good Luck card his classmates at school had signed.

Outside, he started quizzing the limo driver about the car. Maximum speed. Fuel consumption. Brake horse power. Stopping distances. All the Top Trumps stats.

“How should I know, son?” the driver said, despairing. “I just drive the thing.”

 

 

THEY’RE NOT EVEN proper astronauts. What’s up with that? NASA didn’t send civilian nobodies on the Apollo missions. Armstrong and Aldrin and the others, they were test pilots, air force guys, elite. Best of the best. Trained within an inch of their lives. Now it’s a bunch of randoms? That’s what we’re manning a trillion-dollar spaceship with? Don’t make me laugh.

 

 

A YEAR EARLIER, someone from the government had come round to interview us. We weren’t sure why at the time. Claire and I thought maybe it was a benefit-fraud investigation. We’d done something wrong, claimed money we weren’t entitled to, ticked an incorrect box on the disability living allowance form, something of that sort.

Why an infraction like that should have seemed important to anyone, given what else was going on in the world, I didn’t know. But it was the government. Rules were still rules, even as civilisation inched inexorably towards the precipice.

The woman conducting the interview, Maggie, tried to put us at our ease. “It’s just a formality,” she insisted, “an assessment, nothing more. You don’t have anything to be anxious about.”

“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.

 

 

IN 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.

 

 

THE 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.

 

 

THAT 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?

 

 

IT’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.

 

 

“DAD?”

“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.”

 

 

WHO 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.

 

 

MARTIN 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.

 

 

WHAT’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.

 

 

HEATHROW NEARED. THE 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.

 

 

HI! JOHNNY NIMBUS 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.

 

 

JENNY DECIDED TO annoy Martin. Because she liked to and could. One last go, for old times’ sake.

“Martin.”

“Yes?”

“Will you be eating Wookie steaks when you’re in space?”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, will you be eating Wookiee steaks when you’re in space?”

“No. Wookiees aren’t real. And if they were, I wouldn’t eat one because it might be Chewie.”

“Chewy, you mean?” said Jenny, sniggering, triumphant. He had fallen into her trap.

“Chewie. As in Chewbacca. First mate of the Millennium Falcon.”

“But you can’t eat a steak if it’s too chewy.”

“No, you can’t. Oh, I see. A pun.”

“Duh.”

“You’re very juvenile, Jenny.”

“Come on. Give us a smile. It’s funny.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s facile,” said Martin irritably. “It relies on the inadvertent homophonic resemblance between the words Chewie and chewy. It’s not that clever. Why did you bother?”

“Because I knew it would bug you.”

“And what’s the point of that?”

“I dunno. Why not?”

“Well, in future, don’t.”

“Yeah.” And suddenly Jenny was sad. “Anyway, what future?” And morose. “We don’t have a future. Unlike you.”

“Jenny...” chided her mother.

“It isn’t fair. It just isn’t. How come Special Needs Martin gets a ticket to another planet and we don’t? Why can’t we go with him? We’re his bloody family!”

“Jenny, that’s enough,” I said.

“We ought to be allowed to go too. What if he gets lonely?”

“I don’t get lonely,” Martin pointed out.

Jenny burst into tears. Claire slid across the plush leather bench seat to cradle her. It was hard to say which upset Jenny more: losing her brother or being obliged to stay behind. All said and done, she did love Martin. And she didn’t want to die, any more than I did, or Claire, or anyone.

“There isn’t room on Pandora,” I said to Jenny as soothingly as I could. “They can’t take everybody. Just be grateful that one of us is going. Martin met the criteria. Be glad for him.”

“Why should I be glad,” my daughter pouted, “when he isn’t even glad himself?”

“He is,” I said. “I’m sure he is.”

Just not so as you would notice.

 

 

THERE’S THIS RUMOUR going round that some of them are faking it. These parents, they’ve schooled their kids to, like, pretend they’ve got Asperger’s, or bribed a doctor to give them a certificate. To get them on board, yeah? It’s despicable. But then, if I had a kid, maybe I’d do the same. You never know.

 

 

WE PULLED UP virtually on the runway. No need for customs, immigration, passports, check-in, baggage inspection, any of it. A smooth, first-class ride straight onto the tarmac, where a dozen similar limos were already parked. Families stood in knots. A throng of journalists jostled behind barriers, shouting out questions, begging for interviews, and not far from them stood a horde of onlookers, the public, some cheering, some jeering, held back by a line of police. The racket was tremendous. There was a podium with a microphone and a PA system. The prime minister was due to make a speech shortly, a tightly-scripted homily of hope and good wishes.

Martin got out of the car. It didn’t seem to faze him, the enormity of this moment, the significance of it, the irrevocability. He could have been just paying a visit to the local Games Workshop branch in town, for all the excitement he demonstrated. Perhaps that was just as well.

“Will there be Seven Up on board?” was all he said. It was the one, the only carbonated beverage he could stomach. Other than milk, it was the only thing he drank.

“I’m not sure there will be, Martin,” I said. “I think we were told it would be shakes, power smoothies, that sort of thing.”

“Oh. Yes. Well, I don’t like them much.”

“You won’t have a choice. It’s interstellar travel, not popping out for a picnic.”

“I know. I was only asking. I’ll manage.”

Claire fussed over him, finger-combing his hair. Jenny moped by the limo, disconsolate. A cold wind blew. The sky was overcast, the clouds low. The plane and its shuttle hitchhiker would be lost from view mere moments after takeoff.

I looked up at the clouds and shivered in the chill of an unseasonably cold June day. The Incident, making its presence felt. The black blot of nanotech-gone-mad was already affecting weather patterns. It had altered the course of the Gulf Stream and the mean temperature of the Atlantic, which meant mild winters and rainy summers for Europe and beyond. The climate was destined only to get crazier. It was predicted that there would be terrible atmospheric disruption, thunderstorms of biblical proportions, hurricanes, tsunamis, the whole Revelation gamut of acts of God. Within five years, if not sooner, crop yields would go into steep decline, there would be mass starvation, death on an epic scale, followed by epidemics of typhus and cholera, and then, to add to the general cheery forecast, the planet itself would begin to wobble on its axis, its balance skewed by the relative density of the von Neumann replicators. Eventually things would arrive at a literal tipping point, when fully half of the world’s surface area was black, like a permanent eclipse, and the Earth would sheer from its orbital path, the whole delicate equilibrium of celestial mechanics utterly spannered. There was debate as to whether the planet would shoot off into outer space or be drawn in towards the sun, whether our mudball would freeze or burn. Either way, we, its inhabitants, were – what’s the technical term? – oh yes. Fucked. Well and truly fucked.

 

 

LAST NIGHT, ANGELS came to me. It wasn’t a dream, it was a vision. They told me everything is going to be fine. This is all part of God’s plan. If we just have enough faith, pray hard enough, the Incident will reverse itself. It will heal itself. The angels were beautiful. I’m so happy. I’m not making any of this up. It’s true. Don’t be afraid. Believe.

 

 

“THE LUCKY FEW,” the prime minister said. “Chosen. Chosen not by committee, nor by lottery, but by natural selection. The fittest under the circumstances. A representative cross-section of a certain stratum of the population – pragmatic, efficient, dogged, regimented – who will take the human narrative on to the next chapter, continue our story elsewhere, on a distant world. I congratulate you, I envy you, I salute you...”

Blah, blah, blah. I tuned him out. There was only so much high-flown flannel you could endure, especially on the day you and your son were parting company for good.

“Martin,” I said. The time had come. “I love you. You know that.”

“Yeah,” he said.

“And you love me too, in your way. I’m sure of that.”

“If you say so.”

“I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks.”

“I couldn’t be happier for you. And if there’ve been times when I’ve been impatient with you, angry with you, lost my temper, then I’m sorry. I never meant to. It’s been difficult. We’ve tried our hardest, Mum and me. We’ve done everything we can to understand you and accept you.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“We’ll live on in you.”

“Genetically speaking, that’s true.”

“So remember us.”

“I imagine I will.”

 

 

I JUST WANT to say, I’m terrified. I don’t want to die. Everybody out there, do you hear me? I’m so scared. Johnny Nimbus? Is there an afterlife? Are we all going to heaven? Does anyone know? Please, someone, tell me.

 

 

AND THEN HE was gone, strolling with his suitcase towards the mobile stairs that led to the shuttle entrance hatch. He was in a long line with all the other kids. Some were in their mid to late teens like him, the rest not much older than eleven or twelve. Yet all of them strangely adult, serious and sombre as they walked, here and there someone with an oddball gait, a peculiar hand twitch.

Clutching a sobbing Claire and Jenny, I waited for him to look back.

And waited.

All Martin had to do was turn, look at us, maybe raise a hand, possibly smile. That was all he had to do to prove he cared.

Not much.

He reached the stairs.

He climbed the stairs.

And I realised that the only option for me was to look away. So I did. I lowered my head. Turned my gaze aside. Concentrated on a spot on the tarmac to my left.

So that I would never have to know.

Because who wants posterity to deny them? Who can bear, not simply to be forgotten, but to be unacknowledged? Unrecognised? Dismissed as irrelevant by their most precious possession?

Seeing Martin go off to live was a kind of death.

 

 

KEEP ’EM COMING, Cloud Crowd! This is Johnny Nimbus, on the air, in the ether, wireless and tireless, your sentient social network, up all hours and hungry for chat. The shuttles are airborne, the pigeons are eagles, and the stars await, while down here we’ve got terminal cancer of the planet and the lights are going out one by one. So talk. Talk to each other. Talk to me. Tell my silicon soul your innermost secrets. I’m all heart and all ears. My hard drive is wide open to you, my memory stands at a petabyte and counting, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying right here to be your confidant and best friend to the end. To the very bitter end.