1 Hocus and Pocus

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Stephen Whiteside
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1 Hocus and Pocus

Post by Stephen Whiteside » Thu Dec 08, 2011 2:49 pm

1 Hocus and Pocus

© Stephen Whiteside 09.12.2011

Hocus and Pocus were identical twins. Hocus worked for the Curmudgeon Corporation on their large interplanetary space ships. While the human cargo spent their months - or sometimes even years - in deep cryo, it was his job to keep the whole shebang ticking over. Pocus worked as an adventure travel guide and kayak instructor in British Columbia, back on Earth.

Hocus enjoyed his work. There are some, no doubt, who would have found it lonely. He, however, found it safe, comfortable, reassuring.

He was one of three. They worked in eight hour shifts. Eight hours’ work. Eight hours’ sleep. Eight hours’ recreation. It was odd when you thought about it. It was nearly a thousand years since that formula had first been devised back on Earth, yet it had never been abandoned. Such was the deep faith in humans’ evolution in synchrony with the rotation of Earth, that nobody was game to tamper with it. What was the point? And who would pay for the damages if they did, and then something went wrong? Because somebody would certainly have to pay. The lawyers would see to that.

So Hocus always worked alone. Apart from the five minutes of handover at the start and end of each shift. Five minutes on paper, that is. After several weeks in space, it was usually no more than a nod - each ensuring that there was somebody to take their place when they stood down from their shift.

It was a beautiful world out there. An unchanging, dark world of star-light outside and artificial lighting inside. Blue lights. Red lights. Even green lights. Never any white light. It was too bright, too expensive, and quite unnecessary. But it was a bit odd. It was different, of course, when he was off duty. There was white light in his cosy little apartment, white light in the communal kitchen. Same with the gym. Even the cinema could be lit with white light. And there was emergency lighting too, of course, for the rest of the ship. He had never known it to be used, though, outside of the tests, which were held briefly once a month.

Soft coloured lights. Soft beeps and whirrings. It was a beautiful world. The bridge, his favourite place, was a large transparent sphere. Three hundred and sixty degrees of the Universe. What a view!

Of course, there’s no gravity in space, but the ship designers had been clever. Especially clever, when it came to the bridge. At its centre lay a smaller sphere, twenty metres in diameter, connected to the rest of the ship by a four sided walkway. This sphere had a huge gravitational field of its own, which meant no matter where you walked on its surface, you retained the important sense that your feet were down and your head was up. And above your head was the transparent wall of the ship. And the rest of the Universe! You could walk around and around this central sphere for as long as you wished, and watch the stars rotate before you.

Of course, there was never any sense of movement, in spite of the extraordinary speed at which they were travelling. That too, in a way, was reassuring, though it didn’t feel quite natural. There were times he envied Pocus in his little kayak, travelling so much more slowly, yet feeling as though he was racing along!

It wasn’t just the sensation of movement. He envied Pocus’ sense of the wind in his hair, the spray in his face. The salt on his tongue, or in his eyes. Even the sheer discomfort of it all. Hocus could honestly never say he ever felt any discomfort at all. Not even the slightest. Once a week he spent five minutes in the ship’s automated MediLab, and any potential problems were quickly detected and prevented from escalating - even if it was just a bit of chafing from a new uniform. No, he would not die of disease, that was certain. He would die, of course. Senility and aging had not been defeated, despite the loud trumpetings of every successive generation of biological scientists. He would retire at 120 and die at 150 - give or take a few years or so. Of that much he could be certain. But he would never get sick. It would just be a gradual decline. A winding down.

Pocus’ future was less certain. He would more likely die at the age of 120, give or take a decade. But there was about a 10% of developing a malignancy, and dying much sooner. That was a chance he had elected to take. There was zero chance of Hocus developing a malignancy, and he couldn’t say he was sorry about that.

Pocus got to see other life forms, too, and Hocus also envied him that. Bears. Salmon. Eagles. Even killer whales. They weren’t real animals, of course, but there was no way you could pick them from the real thing.

It was so sad, when you thought about it. There were no wild animals left on Earth at all. At least, no birds. No mammals. Insects still existed, though they, too, were fading away, which was odd, when you considered their predators, the birds, had gone. And microbes. There were still microbes, though the numbers of even these were greatly reduced, and it was anticipated they would also disappear eventually. Odd to think of the human bowel functioning in a sterile environment. But there you have it. It would eventually. And there was no function the microbes performed that could not also be achieved by the nanobots. So it was hard to mount a rational argument in opposition.

The sparrows had been the last of the birds. Three hundred years now they’d been gone for. Tough little critters. And so many of them. But they couldn’t hold on forever, and they didn’t.

Still, the ersatz animals were pretty good. Some said they were better than the originals, even. And what a technological triumph it had been! Imagine populating Earth’s oceans with artificial blue whales! They were now back to the pre-whaling numbers, too. And great white sharks. Millions of great white sharks roaming Earth’s oceans.

But here was the clever thing, the reason why they were so popular. They were programmed not to attack humans! It was impossible for any of these animals to attack humans. Assuming they recognised humans, of course. There was still the occasional case of mistaken identity. A shark eating a human it had judged to be a seal, for example.

Which raised an interesting dilemma itself. Because none of these ‘animals’ needed to eat anything. They were all star-powered. The functions of hunting and eating had only been retained for the sake of appearances - to support the tourist industry. It was so much more fun, for example, to see an ersatz, star-powered humpback whale lunge feeding through a cloud of ersatz, star-powered krill, than to simply watch it bobbing on the surface.

But was this risk justified? In the past, it had been felt so, but after a recent run of shark attacks, the tide appeared to be turning. Most unsettling of all, the shark attacks could not be explained. It was a ghastly way to die, even though the numbers were very low. And when you considered it was all simply to support the tourism industry, you had to wonder. Then again, the tourism industry was very important. It constituted about 70% of the total economy, and ‘animal-watching’ was a huge part of it. There were those who speculated that Earth’s economy might collapse without it. Or worse. Perhaps a large percentage of humans would go mad. So it stayed. For now. But the shark attacks were very unsettling. If they didn’t die down spontaneously soon, something would have to give.

And how, you may ask, did Hocus know all of this, stuck, as he was, in a space ship so far from Earth? You might say, well, it was the news bulletins. They arrived constantly. Sure they were a few weeks old by the time they arrived, but they did arrive. But the news bulletins only contained what the Curmudgeon Corporation wanted you to know. And there was a lot that the Curmudgeon Corporation did not want you to know. An awful lot. No, it wasn’t the news bulletins.
Stephen Whiteside, Australian Poet and Writer
http://www.stephenwhiteside.com.au

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