Communicado

In Communicado I run with the idea of bio-computing. That’s because I read Sir Roger Penrose on stable quantum conditions in biological systems and decided to make corporations run their operations on cultured brains in a jar. (I call it these home brew brains ‘prilek’ as a nod to ‘robot’ as coined by Carl Čapek meaning ‘forced labour’. ‘Prilek’ is mish-mash of Czech words plucked out from translating ‘busy dreamer’.)

A corporation may have thousands of highly-interconnected prilek tanks viable at any one time and replacements are always being cultivated to counter the inevitable losses from prilek dementia or strokes.

The cultured prilek grows into maturity but never awakes.

Corporations keep their tame prilek heavily sedated but furiously working in a perpetual manufactured dream state. However someone is seeing signs that the pliant and ever-slumbering prilek might be stirring.

Here are the first few chapters of Communicado.

stopped being fun. 

That’s when I knew I was heading for grief. Sure enough, the day after self-abuse went off the menu of earthly delights, I woke up on Tuesday morning to find the usually pristine lilywhite skin on my legs, arse, belly and arms, polka-dotted with bright red vesicles. When they burst open they looked like wounds from a tiny semi-automatic pin gun. By Wednesday, my physical energy waned like water down the plughole and my mood followed. Feeling sappy and wrung-out quickly became the new status quo and, by Friday, fear and its good buddy, mortal dread, had moved in to occupy any functioning brain space, my body having decided, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to spontaneously self-destruct.

Sick again after almost six years in remission. That’s how I went into this big adventure. Not kicking and screaming, but leaking, oozing, shitting and whining. 

I’m 100% totally un-enhanced, a bit of a rarity nowadays, a bit of a freak really.

Because I get sick in the primitive way that I do, I’m 100% totally un-enhanced, a bit of a rarity nowadays, a bit of a freak really. I’m not bodyform optimised, so I'm skinny and none too strong. My hair and eyes are original and I have far from flawless skin. I can’t tolerate comm implants, vid or audio, so I don’t belong to any pods, either. All this because enhancements, of whatever kind, induce an autoimmune reaction in me of epic proportions – septicaemia, reverse angiogenesis, more Greek, more Latin, and festering throbbing boils big enough to attract teams of climbers. Being un-enhanceable means no auto-monitoring, so no early warnings, either. Just boom, into auto-destruct from the inside out.

This was the fourth time I’d been terminally ill. But I’d been so much younger for the first two attacks I barely knew what was happening to me as I was whisked through the emergency medicare. After the last bout, I knew better. This time, I knew in full explicit detail that being un-enhanced meant a trip to the clinic instead of a clinic being injected into me. Much woe, much grief.

Of course, with my health credentials, none of the better Federations would take my fealty as a free gift so, task-wise, I was freelance and pretty much 100% status-free. Before life as I knew it went all pear-shaped on me, I was on liege contract to a small Node called Cenus. I was one of the serfs who were instrumental in some small way in running this insignificant Node.

As for Cenus, it was nothing whizz bang, either. The Node was housed in what they call a ‘value-priced’ industrial sub-basement in a glamour-free zone out near the Skyport on the estuary, far from the bistros, far from the cafés and people in general. Me and five or six others handled comms, netfeeds, archives, logs and credit flow for several thousand nodules of various minor lieges and client companies. We were also licensed to engender prilek lobes. Not the big species the Federations have, just minor varietals for grunt jobs like routing, remote monitoring or data-mining.

In our lightproof, soundproof, positively-pressured, climate-controlled hole in the ground, it was part of my job to coax stem cells into becoming productive little neurons. I’d flood their nutrient bath with hormones when they were ripe for change, propagating chemical gradients to encourage the little buggers to reach out and hold hands nicely. When I saw they were getting chatty and signals were beginning to flow, I’d start the drip feed of the Morpheus compound into their tank to keep them sleeping. When fattened up and mature, it was time to take the lobes we’d grown from the nursery tanks and graft them onto a mature prilek for training. When a prilek lobe was ripe for podding, Briso would let me assist in The Serious Work. We'd lace up a fistful of young, dumb prilek lobe to the grown-up version and he'd show me how to map on the pre-natal prilek basic training instructions. When all the signalling metrics were in sync, we’d cultivate a pons to grow the permanent connection and thus a new prilek was born, ready for gainful employ. It’d never wake up but prilek could think like a bastard, unconsciously processing for a living, earning its keep in the tanks just like Capek intended when he perfected the process. Smart man but tin ears. He gave his offspring a pre-Federation name none of us could pronounce so it got chopped down by the linguistically challenged to prilek. But everybody knew it meant ‘busy dreamer’. Aww, doesn’t that make you think of a hibernating dormouse? Some fucking dormouse that turned out to be.

Anyway, on top of the gestation work, I’d top up our nascent prilek tanks with the appropriate goops, test for protein contamination and re-tune the light panels when they strayed off-frequency.

Dead clever close-up, this stuff, but deadly dull as a spectator sport. You've just got to be into it, I suppose, and I was by default. There was no way I was ever going to pilot any of the aerospikes I'd watch cracking open the sky above the sea, however much I wanted to.

Still, what I did caused no pain, did no harm and there was some money involved. Best of all, there was precious little contact with Joe and Josephine Public. Human contact was minimal, especially if you factored in Karl, the Anti-Social sociopath who, in between fucking, barking and ankle biting, purportedly ran the place.

I suppose the saving grace of our bunker was that it was still indie. Being this far out geographically and functionally tiny keeps us below most of the Federation's radar and beyond the vice-free grip of convention. Consequently, while working the graveyard shift, I'd strip off in the warmth of the tank room and tan in the UV. I know it's very lower order but I'd sometimes feel so pallid, almost transparent. I'd lie naked on a bench swaddled by warm vapours and bake lightly at 3200nM for twenty minutes, tuning into the forty-cycle hum of the tubules deep in the prilek cells switching states from sol to gel and back again.

In the folding of a protein, infinite possibilities reduce to a bubble of reality tunnelling across gap junctions, membranes and synapses

In the Federations’ big prilek tanks, where my imagination can barely reach, gravity is folding infinitesimal packets of space inside tubulins, while indeterminate quantum states are collapsing into one state. In the folding of a protein, infinite possibilities reduce to a bubble of reality tunnelling across gap junctions, membranes and synapses, propagating thought around the prilek. Thoughts beyond number in and out, potassium and calcium gates shunting ions as fast as chemistry allows, rippling signals of carefully timed micro-voltages. A pseudo-callosum switches chemistry to light speed optical impulses and hastens the passage of prilek input and output around the world. Instead of billions of cells linked together in one brain network. My buddy Sergei says the tens of thousands of prilek are effectively brains linked to brains to make one brain. A smaller network certainly but with much, much greater complexity.

Through a couple of metres of scuffed black optic line made in TaiWei, those freshly-minted thoughts and pearls of data zap around the world, forging new realities as they’re passed from prilek to prilek; the new knowledge, the new data, the new now. All of which lasts for a slice of time, almost too thin to measure, and then the next reality comes right along to takes its place.

While ever-dreaming prilek so elegantly and efficiently runs the world, my own randomly disrupted cells are so fucked-up no Federation in their right mind would take me into their liege. All the blobs of useful stuff are in the tanks I tend. That artificial skull marrow doesn’t even know it’s thinking, but it still needs minions like me to keep it dreaming, feed it and metaphorically wipe its neuro-physical arse.

So that's me. Graeme Peerval. Gray by name, grey by palour. President, Grand Commander, Lord High Poobah of Sweet Fuck All, Cenus Node, Bostonside-ish, East Metropolitan Area.

Good human.

Lie down.

Stay.

Out here there are no in-betweens. It's either too bright or too dark, too hot or too cold. Too much O₂ or too little. And, for about 3.9 persons per month, too dangerous. This large but tatty chunk of post proto-planetary debris is being mined because the Loman prospector who spectroscoped it years ago reported all sorts of rare and exotic irradiated compounds bound up in ice and rock. The presence of water has created all sorts of rare compounds and ostensibly that's why people come here, even if the water is unsuitable for drinking. And, despite costing stupendous amounts of credits to ship everything and everybody out here, nevertheless, here it all is.

The Loman Federation wouldn't be investing like this it if weren't getting something more than purer ores and freak-show organics in return. The undeclared payback was in learning how to stay alive out here. Once Loman mastered that, they could strip-mine the cosmos. Meanwhile, this remote and precipitous learning curve was littered with casualties and bits of casualties.

L-2701C tumbles as it spins as it eccentrically twists. Not only does this make it unduly difficult to land on, it makes you nauseous through three different axes when you arrive. The sun rising and setting wherever and whenever it pleases adds to the fun. Shadows creep as fast as a man can bound. Far away as it is, the sun's still as bright as a welding torch and just as easy to look at. On the surface there's no colour, but sooty, impenetrable blacks, speckled greys and searing whites.

Scoured down to the rock by silent down thrusters, the blasted patch used for landings is a charred and scarred rink ninety-five metres across. For just a second or so after a landing or take-off, there are puddles of run-off meltwater out near the wall of rubble and discarded junk that surrounds the landing site. These puddles form flawless black mirrors filled with stars and infinite depth before the lacy crystals of ice and complex compounds rapidly re-freeze, drawing a veil over the whole fleeting illusion.

Sabaa Fleming landed at this site after a journey measured in months. Now his colleague, Bracaz, has driven Fleming and his equipment out here into the inky shadows of a large ridge and stands by, while Fleming drills for samples.

Sabaa Fleming is drilling in the dark, but he knows the terminator's coming his way again soon. However, in the temporary darkness, his suit lights enable him to see, his suit heater keeps him warm and comms keep him sane. Unfortunately, this robust and reliable suit will also keep him alive much longer than he'd like.

Silently, a support leg fractures and the drilling rig topples and falls apart. A support truss breaks off from the buckling rig, driving itself through Bracaz's suit, upwards under his ribcage, lifting him off the surface and carrying him up and backwards several meters. Bracaz sinks back slowly to the surface, fluffing up little clouds of dust at the contact points. He dies with little more than a muffled cough. Sabaa Fleming doesn't know this, though, because he is screaming and the noise fills his helmet. Fleming is screaming because he's being propelled upwards by the unannounced gases abruptly released by his drilling. He's screaming because he knows he won't stop.

A monitoring station automatically catches Fleming's faint and frantic exchanges with his base, while an enterprising functionary forwards it Earthward for a lucrative live exclusive. It will be three days before Fleming opens his helmet.

As Fleming's cries reach Earth, a laden vessel plodding back from the Belt, Loman's barge, High Times, receives a message.

 [No sender, no address.] Text: Leave.

When High Time's crew extrapolate their newly-determined trajectory, the crew flee, jettisoning the hefty and costly cargo to its fate.

Under an ageing glass skylight, in the soft grey, almost light of pre-dawn, Roger squatted on the top step of the uppermost flight of stairs, staring into the stairwell. He was folded into the shape of a small boy, but his head was too large and his legs too long. His feet and hands had long outgrown his childhood.

With his forehead pressed hard against the cast iron banister railings, he was staring down through the slow spiral of stairwell, into the darkness of the hallway at the foot of the stairs. The paint-filled mouldings of the ironwork indented his forehead with a crude pattern of flowers from just above his eye and into his thick head of hair. He neither noticed nor cared. Beside him, on the stair, lay several strips of white paper, torn to exactly the same width.

He picked up one of the strips and carefully folded it. Then he carefully tore a section from the strip, held it out over the void below, and dropped it.

‘Mummy.’

While that scrap fluttered downward like a shot bird, Roger tore off another piece and dropped it before the first piece had landed.

‘Daddy.’

Watching attentively, he counted how many seconds and bits of seconds it took for each piece of paper to spin and spiral down.

‘Mummy.’

Another piece.

‘Daddy.’

Then Roger calculated how high he'd have to be in order to fall for all those seconds and bits of seconds. He'd seen vids about the high towers ‑ how long a bolt took to fall twelve hundred meters, for example. Roger multiplied accordingly. He pulled off another scrap of paper and released it, watching it flutter, trying to fly, but falling for all those seconds.

‘Mummy.’

It was getting light enough now for Roger to watch Mummy fall all the way down to join the specks below. When that sheet of paper was finished, Roger picked up another. By the time the rest of the house awoke, the hallway at the foot of the stairwell was littered with confetti.

The staff found Roger still at the top of stairs, paper all gone, hugging his knees, rocking, reciting his usual mantra. ‘I am the king. I am the king. I am the king.’