Pinko Commie Superbunker, Part 3/7
All spacefaring species are communists
Don’t worry, there’s no long intro! But if you’ve only just joined us you may wish to read from the beginning. In which case, Part 1 is there, and the previous Part 2 is there. You can also read the pinned post for Unofficial Katy’s section for a little more background.
Previously in the story, Katy has been requisitioned by Caligula Jones, the world’s third richest capitalist, to help design him a superbunker, because the end of the world is nigh. At least he thinks so, because Katy wrote about it in her sci-fi books and Cali believes every word she wrote. He also believes that she is what she says she is, that’s to say an extraterrestrial feline from the Sirius system incarnated into a human. Probably for the purposes of nothing but interstellar mischief.
Anyway, in this episode, well, you’ll just have to read it.
To get you back in the movie mood, here is another classic cinema advert to trigger a little nostalgia in you. This story is a movie, after all…
“Dunbar’s number?” Cali was a little alarmed. “I can’t think of anything worse than being holed up in a place where everyone knows each other’s intimate secrets. Are you sure she’s thought this psychology through?”
“She says that’s why we’re a dystopia.”
“Oh?”
“She defines the number differently,” Nathan explained. “The number of other people one can know to a sufficient extent that you can know whether someone else is a good guy or a bad guy. Bad guys, in primal, ancient times, would be detected and ostracised for the good of the social group. It’s an evolutionary thing, she says. Meaning that after our agricultural revolution when we started to live in larger groups, that ability to detect bad guys was lost and since then our history has been governed by their machinations. Hence the dystopia.”
“That’s an interesting theory.” Cali was genuinely intrigued.
“She says it’s just basic psychohistory.”
“Oh? I wouldn’t have put her down as a fan of Asimov. Have you read her books?”
Nathan frowned. “Yeah, well, she was a little disparaging of Asimov, shall we say. Not enough aliens or quantum theory, she says.”
Cali leaned back in his plush armchair and looked over the schematics again. “Still, it’s not a bad design. And more importantly, well within budget.”
“How much?” Nathan was almost afraid to ask.
“Oh, around a hundred million or so.” Nonchalantly, of course.
You could afford 1500 of them, was Nathan’s unspoken thought. “Shall I tell them to go ahead, then?”
“Oh yes,” Cali grinned. “Mind you,” he narrowed his eyes and turned back to the schematics, “I think the clubhouse bar could be a little bigger, though, don’t you?”
Katy and Nathan were in the elegant drawing room, reading. Nathan looked up from The Final Intervention.
“Is this true?”
“It’s all true. Which bit specifically?”
“You say the chance of an ELE-asteroid strike is around 1 in 50 million.”
“That’s a conservative estimate, but it’s about right.”
“So there should’ve been around twelve over the last 600 million years, since the planet was a snowball? But there’s only been one?”
“Which is proof of exo-intervention.”
“So you’re saying you did this to the dinosaurs, too?”
“Not us, no. I think that was what we call a Quiet Time in our sector. Hardly any spacefaring lifeforms. Either that or the AI malfunctioned. Mind you, let dromaeosaurids develop opposable claws, not to mention art, mathematics, and interstellar travel and you’re asking for trouble. Vicious things, they were.”
Nathan frowned. “And this stuff about the Melurians? One of the first ever intelligent lifeforms, seven billion years ago. Is that true?”
Katy sighed and suddenly granted him a very deep, mournful look. She just nodded.
He noticed. “Sort of makes the Death Star look mostly harmless.”
“Sure. Interesting that he called it that, though. The best translation of the Melurian’s time capsule suggests they would’ve put it the other way round. Star deaths. Observed by their astronomers over the course of several thousand years, there one night, gone the next. And getting closer. Almost like it was following a systematic course, wiping out G-type stars. It was only into the final century, when they invented radio telescopes, that they calculated the velocity of the phenomenon was around one third lightspeed.”
“And that it was only twelve lightyears away?”
She looked seriously at him, again. “So,” she said, “now do you understand the necessity of intervention? At an early stage, before it ever gets that far?”
“That’s your Prime Directive, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Everyone is taught about it when they’re young. And every species, at some point, develops an allegorical story about The Ancient War. It’s a primal, collective memory. And it’s why I chose my specialism. Because it upset me more than I can say. I hate imperialism, because I’ve seen it in the Galactic Archive. The Capellans showed us when my clan came to this planet during your Cretaceous. You could say I found my calling. And I love this planet more than I can say. She is our second home.”
Nathan did get it. And he was genuinely curious. “And this happens in every galaxy? When lifeforms are too few and far between to intervene?”
“Almost certainly,” she said.
Nathan put the book down on the ornate little side table and contemplated noiselessly for a while. Katy decided not to read his thoughts.
That would’ve been intrusive.
Sixteen months to impact…
Cali put the phone down with a worried look on his face and hurried into the drawing room, where Katy was mischievously reading The Sentinel. She smiled to herself, but didn’t look up.
“I’m afraid we have a problem, Katy,” Cali began.
“Oh?” she looked up.
“I’ve just got off the phone from one of my Congressmen, and he says there’s an extradition order out on you.”
“Ah, well, that explains the men in black turning into your driveway.”
“Well, that at least gives us a bit of time.”
“Sure.”
She didn’t seem worried. Which worried him. “They say you’re wanted on charges of blasphemy and sedition. You shouldn’t have said all those nasty things about King Charles.”
“I didn’t!”
“Well, his mother, then.”
“She was a nasty person who didn’t care about her subjects. All those awful bits of legislation she signed off on. A true queen is supposed to protect her people. Ask Boudicca.”
“Be that as it may,” Cali continued, “I’m not sure I can help you on this one.”
“Sure you can. Just ask them how much they want.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Hmm. Well, you may be right there actually. This must be a parallel world.”
“How did I know you were going to bring parallel worlds into this?”
“Put it this way. I was fully expecting to be locked up in a certain women’s prison in North London when the time came. I’d die quickly and then my soul would just float on home. Clearly that’s not going to happen. So it must be a parallel world.”
Cali sighed. Then smiled. “So, this means you’re not going to be extradited? I mean, your species does time travel, right?”
“Sometimes.”
“So what’s going to happen now?”
She shrugged. “Beats me. Like I said, must be a parallel version. Still,” she mused, “let me concentrate.” She put the book down, closed her eyes, and drifted her soul out the window.
Cali looked out of the same window, not noticing her. There was dust on the horizon. “Don’t take too long about it. Looks like a black Tesla to me.”
She came back. That was quick. Time travel, presumably. “Aren’t they all black?” she mused, “Any colour you like and all that?”
“Only the FBI.”
“Not immigration control?”
“Have you finished concentrating yet?” Cali decided to pull the curtains together. He turned around.
She was smiling. “Well,” she said, “you know they don’t really care about prosecuting me. They just want to torture some information out of me. The usual.”
“What information? Oh, I know. The asteroid stuff, right?”
“Sure. So, we’ll just tell them. Then they can build their own superbunkers. That’s what they’re after. It’s not as if they care about saving anyone but themselves, eh?”
“I don’t disagree with you there. And it is suspicious that SpaceX’s share price keeps on shooting up. Maybe they’ve spotted it already.”
“And just haven’t told the public. All very predictable.”
Cali peeked through a chink in the curtains. He decided, forlornly, that he should’ve made his driveway longer. “So what are you going to tell them?”
Katy smiled. “Tell Nathan to go fetch the schematics. We’ll tell them everything. And we’ll even throw in the superbunker plans for good measure. In exchange for my freedom from extradition, obviously. And, well, a nice lucrative set of government grants to your lovely company to help with all those pretty superbunkers, eh? Once they can’t hide it from the public anymore, that is. Unless you want to leak it early?”
Cali grinned again. He felt better. Much better. Business dealings were, after all, something at which he’d been a past master for what, thirty years?
Or was it forty? Hard to recall nowadays.
Anyhow. On with the story.
“CERES?!!”
“CERES!!!”
“Talk about overkill. Get me the White House on the phone!”
Katy caught Nathan pondering the plans again. She sent him a little thoughtform as she entered. Far more elegant than a polite cough. He turned around.
“There’s something bugging you about my design, isn’t there?”
“Sort of. I just can’t put my finger on it. But I know you’re up to something.”
She grinned mischievously. “Of course I am. Can’t you guess?”
“No. You’ll have to enlighten me.”
“Hmm. Ok. Well, remember Dunbar’s number?”
“That again. What this time?”
“I’ll try the Socratic method. I’ve always loved that one. Anyhow, here’s a rhetorical question.”
“Isn’t that all the Socratic method is? A series of inane and patronising rhetorical questions?”
“Not just a pretty face, eh. Sure. Anyway, do you think that in a social group of around 150 people, which is how humanity lived for, what, two hundred thousand years or so, to which your brains and behaviour became best adapted, it would be possible to have hierarchies?”
“You want me to say no, right?”
“Correct answer. In order to understand your own, human nature, you simply need to visualise life in that kind of social environment. To wit, you don’t like being patronised, do you?”
“You noticed.”
“Lol. Do you think anyone likes being patronised?”
He shook his head.
“Well, there you go.”
“Stop being cryptic and just out with it.”
“Sure. Well, you wouldn’t have, say, an alpha male in such a situation, would you? Trying to lord it over everyone else, trying to steal other people’s girlfriends and coveting his neighbour’s axe and all that. Or developing some neo- or techno-feudalist or neoliberal society or whatever. Let alone fomenting internal animosity or distracting the people with racism and warring hatred of out-groups just to entrench his power. It just wouldn’t happen.”
“Your point being?”
“In a social group like that, as I can well attest, since I was there for a while, everything is held in common. Everybody shares each other’s surplus value. Selfish people are ostracised. Everyone looks after each other. Everyone has fun. Everyone has their own specialist role and all roles are equally valid. Likewise there is no conflict between the genders. And certainly no patriarchy. In fact, it’s what you might definitely call a commune.”
Nathan realised he knew what was coming. And if he was honest with himself, he had known since she first showed him the plans.
She continued, “In conclusion, Nathan darling, you need to get used to the self-realisation idea that, as it turns out, your species, like, well, all advanced species who make it to the spacefaring age, are communists!”
“Pah!”
“And I think, my dearest friend, and not in a patronising way, that the problem with your species is that you’ve all just simply forgotten your true, primal evolutionary nature. And it’s just about time that you remembered.”
And with that, along with a by now customary, not a little wicked, grin, she wheeled around like a girl and spun out the room.
Nathan, for his part, just stood there and frowned. Maybe he didn’t want to be selected after all…
Next episode next week…