Far, far away: part 5

The good, old days

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: Former Met detective Yannick Clarke is now a private investigator, investigating a young koth who has gone missing on Ceres. His efforts have led him to a construction guild, responsible for expanding the Ceres colony…

Lower Merkado, Ceres.
2550.

There were worse ways to pass the time. A convenient consequence of the construction site being at the very end of the inhabited tunnels is that there was nowhere else to go, which meant that anybody showing up for work with the Ceres Expansion Guild had to go down the same tunnels and past the same shops and cafés. A little further back and it was residential cubicles, before returning to the Merkado proper. Out on the outskirts, the few cafés that existed were there to serve the construction workers and a handful of locals.

Clarke might have been out of place, but a greasy spoon was his natural habitat. He’d changed his jacket, but otherwise looked like your average older, retired, slightly out of shape bloke that could once have worked a construction floor, long ago, or been a small-fry accountant for the company. Clarke had always known that he was an unremarkable-looking man, which had served him extremely well over the decades as a plain clothes cop.

He’d got there early, before the café had opened and long before the construction office opened for the day. By the time the tunnellers and builders arrived, he was ensconced in the corner of the outside seating area with a coffee and a not-really-bacon sandwich. The notion of ‘indoors’ was more than a little strange on Ceres. He could choose to sit inside the café proper, or on the raised decking outside. In both cases, he would still be inside the larger tunnel that made up the tenth level of Ceres. There was no such thing as real ‘outside’ without a spacesuit. As with the lighting and the imposition of day and night, Ceres was a make-believe place that worked hard to create its own reality. It was almost enough to make him forget he was on a tiny rock hurtling through space.

Almost.

On a tattered old cardboard coaster, he scratched another mark with a coin as a koth in high-vis sauntered past, towards the office kiosk and whatever work lay beyond in the blocked-off tunnels. He’d had the coin in his wallet when they’d made their escape from London. Not much use for it on Max-Earth, but he’d kept it as a reminder of unfinished business.

He idly wondered about the manufacturing requirements for high-vis jackets, when they had to fit so many different body shapes. Back home there was large and small, and neither would have fit a koth. So much workforce potential across so many sectors, but most of it was locked out due to regulations and industry protections, leaving a lot of koth in London twiddling their claws and hanging out on street corners. The rules didn’t keep up with the times.

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, Clarke had thought it all quite natural. Humans for human jobs. Koth were untrustworthy, prone to criminal activity and violent rages, and unsuitable for steady employment.

Right?

Jesus.

He pinched his nose between his thumb and forefinger and sighed. It had only taken him sixty years to wise up. Better late than never.

He scratched off another mark.

Another hour and the core workforce had arrived, all thirty of them. The full complement of staff, as explained so considerately by the foreman.

But they kept coming, one at a time or in small, chaperoned groups. All koth, all waved past the office and the barrier after some sort of ID check. By mid-morning the flow of new arrivals had stopped. He kept an eye, but otherwise enjoyed flicking through a dog-eared paperback and consuming endless cups of tea. Lunch was a simple and greasy fried affair, which was precisely what Clarke craved. A stakeout in an eatery was definitely a step up from some of the slums he’d holed up in as a younger officer.

The hours drifted by lackadaisically, Clarke wrestling with his eyelids as he struggled to keep himself awake. At one point he strained to hear the television, which was broadcasting new pictures from the Atlantic portal back on Mid-Earth. Somebody was giving a speech on the research station’s gantry, a tall and stern aen’fa, flanked by an equally serious koth and a couple of others Clarke couldn’t properly identify against the glare of the lights and the low quality of the footage. Whoever they were, it wasn’t the people who were supposed to be in charge of the Atlantic portal station. Retribution against these upstarts from Palinor would no doubt be swift and merciless. Brave but stupid, like all other rebellious optimists. It’d be good to get in touch with Detective Birhane back in Addis; he’d have a better sense of the situation.

Not that Clarke had any business meddling in the grand affairs of the triverse. He’d tried that; it hadn’t worked out.

As the lights on level ten began to shift through the spectrum to signify the ending of the day, he watched as the koth workforce piled out of the construction site and disappeared off to wherever their evenings would take them. A round thirty, no more, no less. The stragglers, the additions, were nowhere to be seen. Wherever they’d gone, down the work-in-progress tunnels, they were still there.

The hotel was a dive, but not to the point that he was going to catch anything nasty. That was good enough. The sheets were changed daily, even if the mattress was somehow both flat and concave. Every morning he’d wake up with a crick in his neck. There were many more salubrious establishments in other districts on the level, and especially closer to the dock, but Clarke had wanted to be near to the action.

That may have been a mistake, he realised, as he woke in the night with the palpable sensation that somebody else was in the room with him. He had been asleep facing the wall, but could hear a deep, rattling breathing and sensed he wasn’t alone.

He turned over and sat up in the bed rapidly, trying to get into a defensive position, only to come face to face with the maw of a koth, dark and silhouetted against the dim illumination coming from the bathroom.

Swearing, Clarke scrabbled backwards, pushing himself up, desperately trying to get clear, to get to his feet, to get anywhere but there. Fighting a koth was pointless, but perhaps he could make it to the corridor, raise the alarm.

The koth reached out with one arm and grabbed at him, slamming him back down onto the bed. The springs creaked and something snapped under the impact; fortunately not his spine. The wind was knocked from his lungs and Clarke grabbed at the thick, rough arm, trying to get free.

“Stop,” the koth said. “Stop wriggling. It’s pointless. And nobody is going to hear you.”

The koth’s weight was pressing him down into the bed, pushing the air from his lungs. “Lights,” was all he managed. Later, he realised he probably should have requested assistance instead.

The room lit up, giving Clarke his first good look at his attacker. For a moment he was confused, like he’d seen someone familiar but entirely out of context — like that time he’d seen Paul, the bartender from The White Horse, in a supermarket — then his brain kicked into gear.

“Pa’kan,” he said, choking, “what are you doing here?”

The koth leaned in, their breath hot and sulphuric. “Why are you asking around about me?” If the kid was going to kill him, he’d have done it already.

Clarke slapped at the koth’s arm and raised his eyebrows expectantly. Seeming to reconsider, Pa’kan released their grip on Clarke’s chest and stood back to their full height.

“Thanks,” Clarke said, moving to a seated position, his back against the wall. “Hard to answer questions when you’re throttling me.”

“I still might. Who are you? You working for Red Dust?”

“What? No.” Clarke was unable to hide his distaste for even the suggestion. Red Dust, an organised criminal gang operating out of Mars, specialising in smuggling operations between Earth and Mars. He’d asked Justin about them once, and why they were allowed to exist, and had received only a virtual shrug and and assertion that it was all within expected parameters. “Your family asked me to find you.” He pulled the job request up on his watch — miraculously, without too much faffing — and held it up for Pa’kan to see.

“Those idiots,” Pa’kan wailed, holding their head in their hands and pacing the room. “They’re going to get me into trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“I got caught up in some stuff. I’ve been trying to lie low, get off the grid.”

“So you came to Ceres?”

“I’d heard it was a safe space.”

Raising an eyebrow, Clarke swung his legs down onto the carpet. He tidied his pyjama shirt and rotated his neck carefully. He was going to be sore in the morning. “I’ve known safer places. Especially down here on level ten.”

The koth shook their head vociferously, looking at Clarke as if he was an idiot. “I’m not staying here, on Lower Merkado.”

Clarke held up his hands in mock surrender. “Why not book passage back to Earth, go back to your family, and be safe there instead?”

“I don’t want to get them into trouble, either!” The koth sounded more and more like a teenager in over their head. “Besides, nobody is going to find me down below.”

“I found you.”

“Nobody else!”

“Look, kid,” Clarke said, standing with a groan. “I can probably help. If you’ll let me. But you have to tell me what’s going on.” What had they said? Down below. Worth pushing on that one. “Want to tell me where you’re going all day? You’re not working construction. So what else is down that tunnel?”

Pa’kan froze, as if trying to avoid being spotted in a game of hide-and-seek. “What do you know about that?”

“I know a whole bunch of you are disappearing down there and not coming back up. Present company excluded.”

“You can’t tell anyone!”

Clarke sighed. “Look, kid, I’ve been paid half to find you, another half on delivery or solid information. Something’s going on, it seems a little fishy, and I don’t like it when things don’t add up.”

Waving their hands and looking on the verge of a panic attack, Pa’kan sank to the floor in a heap. “I can’t go back home. They don’t understand. They just want to live like Max-Earthers. That’s why I had to get out. I didn’t mean to get into trouble with Red Dust, and then I found out about this place. I’m safe here.”

“Safe where? On Ceres?”

“More like in Ceres. It’s a new colony. A new hive. Just like the real ones back home. We’ll be able to live more traditionally, like in the good old days.”

“You’re too young to remember the good old days, kid.” A hive, then. Clarke had read about them, how some early Mid-Earth explorers had visited such places where koth congregated underground or in the caverns of mountains. “You’re burrowing into Ceres, then? More so than usual? Is it safe?”

“It’s totally safe. We’re doing it quietly, it’s just for us. In-between levels. Nobody else needs to know.”

Walking sluggishly towards the tiny, pretend kitchen, Clarke held up two fingers. “Here’s what you’re going to do. One: you record a message to send to your family, saying that you’re safe, and that I found you. You don’t have to give specifics. Two: You need to shut the fuck up about this ‘hive’ of yours when a complete stranger starts asking questions. Like I just did.”

Pa’kan looked nonplussed. “What?”

“Jesus H Christ! You’re the one that broke into my room, smashed me against the wall, nearly throttled me. Or have you forgotten? It was a long time ago, to be fair. Back in those good old days, perhaps.” He flicked the kettle on. “You were the one who was supposed to be interrogating me, if you remember.”

“Sorry. It didn’t feel right.”

“I know, I was the one under your arm.” Clarke pulled a teabag from the pot and dropped it into the mug. “Whatever this hippy commune is you’re building, you can’t go around telling everyone.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Clarke slammed his palm down on the worktop with a bang. “For fuck’s sake, Pa’kan, why are you apologising to me? Grow a spine.” He shook his head, then pointed a finger. “In my good old days, you koth were properly frightening. Now look at you. Get a grip.”

“Are you going to tell anyone?”

“Jesus wept. No, on the condition that you send that message to your family and let them know that you’re alive and well.”

It was 3am. Fortunately, Pa’kan opted not to stay for a cuppa.

Not an entirely satisfactory end to the missing person case, not least because his quarry had ended up finding him in the end. But closure was closure.

A hidden hive colony within Ceres, where they could live out a pretend version of the lives they’d lost.

He laughed. The irony wasn’t lost.

His watch beeped. Flicking at the screen, he found a message waiting for him. It was short, only a single paragraph, but it was enough:

Clarke, I’m sorry it’s been so long. I have so much to tell you. Meet me in Addis. Love, Lola Styles.

---

Thanks for reading.

Lola’s back! Well, at least in message form. At least that means she’s not dead, right?

The thing I was mostly reading this week was More slop for the void over on Garbage Day. Hits the nail on the head as to the when and why everything in popular culture started to feel a bit…pointless. Especially in the realms of TV and film. I’ve really noticed that the three ‘entertainment’ things I’m still into and passionate about are the ones I don’t have any form of subscription for: games, comics and books.

Beth Spencer

’s ‘Created with human intelligence’ badge is still doing the rounds, popping up all over the shop. The latest is over on Fast Company. Meanwhile, generative AI seems to have somewhat stalled, Ed Zitron reports that even Goldman Sachs are getting sniffy. There are still many twists and turns to come, I’m sure, but it’s going to be a bumpy road if all those investors start to think they’re in a bubble. It’s going to get nasty before it gets better.

Meanwhile, last weekend was Phoenix Fest, a day-long festival of art workshops for young creators. We couldn’t make it down to Oxford, but my son had a couple of friends round and they spent all day sketching away while we watched the digital stream of the day. They’d even put on a couple of digital-exclusive sessions. Brilliantly organised — the Phoenix team (including

Neill Cameron 🤖

, of these parts) have been doing stellar work for over a decade and it’s something really quite special. If you have children 8-14, jump on it.

And without getting too grandiose, my friends, watching those three kids was a far better vision of the future of art than anything the dullards in Silicon Valley have come up with.

Speaking of Neill, I interview him a while back:

And finally, my Babylon 5 rewatch hit a big moment, which again made me think about serial storytelling:

Right, let’s do some author notes…

Author notes

At last, we meet Pa’kan.

There are a couple of ideas in ‘Far, far away’ that appealed to me. First is the notion of a community of koth digging their own settlement into Ceres, creating a place more similar to their old hives on Palinor. Dragon creatures from another dimension living on a colonised asteroid in the belt. That’s a story point I’d never have thought of in isolation, but which emerges naturally out of the collision of influences in Triverse.

Secondly, there’s the comparison of the koth creating a fabricated space for themselves and trying to pretend they’re still back home, with Clarke’s own predicament. Still playing at being detective, but on his own now, with no crew. Not quite right, not quite the same.

We also have Clarke handling himself fairly well, considering the circumstances. His fear of koth is well and truly under control, which is representative of a larger change in himself. Most people, apparently, being more conservative, more rigid and entrenched in their thinking as they get older. A few don’t, including Clarke. He’s gone the other way, much to his own surprise.

And, of course, Lola’s note. It’s not easy getting a message out of Palinor these days. What could have changed to enable this to happen?

Next week, a shift of perspective.

Thanks for reading!