The Paradox Paradox, page 1
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Fuck Yeah, Video Games
For Rebecca
‘Rail travel at high speed is not possible.’
Dr Dionysius Lardner, 1830
‘I can state flatly that heavier than air flying machines are impossible.’
Lord Kelvin, 1895
‘There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.’
Albert Einstein, 1932
‘I have experimental evidence that time travel is not possible.’
Steven Hawking, 2012
Class of 2783
‘When people look back at 2783, they’ll likely remember the Betelgeuse evacuations that dominated many a headline. For myself, I shall remember my beloved class, pictured here during our annual “Dress like a 21st-Century Nerd” day, and their promise that, if time travel is ever invented, they’ll all band together and support a historic novel during its backing phase, thus altering the timeline irrevocably. Good luck kids!’
Mr Hardcastle, Class Teacher for Remedial Adults
Due to an unfortunate accident involving the speed of light and some matches, the following students were not visible at the time of taking photos. This effect should hopefully wear off in the next five to ten years.
The following contents page uses Flashback Lock™ technology, re-arranging chapter numbers into a simple, chronological order for the convenience of the reader. The earliest events of the story will be Chapter One, no matter when they appear in the novel itself. Flashback Lock™: Because nobody likes remembering dates.
Flashback Lock™ technology has been scientifically tested to reduce headaches, nosebleeds, and yells of ‘oh for fuck’s sake’ as you thumb back to a previous chapter to try and work out in what order any of this is happening. Side effects of Flashback Lock™ technology include an inability to think unlinearly, ruptures in causality, and bloating. If used across multiple timelines, Flashback Lock™ may produce inaccurate results. Please consult your doctor before or after using Flashback Lock™ technology.
Contents
Synchronisation
Part I Chapter Two – The Last Billionaire
Chapter Six – The Universe’s Choice
Chapter Five – The Flight of the Paracosm
Chapter Seven – Teamwork by Technicality
Chapter Eight – All Creatures Great and Small
Chapter Nine – The Cerebral Slammer
Chapter Ten – Twinkle
Part II Chapter Four – Moondust
Chapter Eleven – Tomorrow, Six Hundred Years Later
Chapter Twelve – Fruit Juice
Chapter Thirteen – The Poison in the Heart
Chapter Fourteen – Crossing that Rubicon
Chapter Fifteen – Day One
Chapter Sixteen – The White Night’s Sky
Chapter Seventeen – No More Time Travel
Chapter Eighteen – Packing up Shop
Part III Chapter Nineteen – Dad’s House
Chapter Twenty – All in your Head
Chapter Twenty-One – The Homefront
Chapter Twenty-Two – Journey of the Borderer
Chapter Twenty-Three – Touching Base
Chapter One – Harker
Chapter Twenty-Four – The Fire
Chapter Twenty-Five – Kill Austin Lang
Chapter Twenty-Six – Plan C
Part IV Chapter Three – New Berlin
Chapter Twenty-Seven – First, Do No Harm
Chapter Twenty-Eight – Wake Up Call
Chapter Twenty-Nine – Giving it Everything
Chapter Thirty – Never, Again
Chapter Thirty-One – Killing with Kindness
Chapter Thirty-Two – Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Supporters
A Note on the Author
Synchronisation
//Begin
Hello, valued reader.
Congratulations on your purchase of The Paradox Paradox, the latest book from the galaxy’s finest publisher, Unbound Technologies. For this book to function at its optimum settings, we shall now perform a brief, invasive scan of your brain. Please state at this time if you wish to opt out of this examination, or if any of the following particularly sensitive topics should be avoided. Embarrassing memories. Fetishes. Political opinions. Political fetishes.
//Running the zero-response protocol …
Thank you for your lack of reply. Commencing scan.
//Scanning …
//Scan complete. Wow, that was fast. You should read more.
//Analysing …
//Reporting.
Based on your understanding of fashion, celebrity crushes, and musical tastes, Unbound Technologies estimate that you are currently residing in the year 1997. References in the book shall be updated.
To assist with your detected attention deficit disorder, a small electric shock will fire every time you look away from the page. WARNING: Please do not read this book in the bath.
Medical status report: Unbound Technologies estimate your lifespan to be approximately …
//ALERT: POSSIBLE INTERNET ERA USER DETECTED.
//ACTIVATE PEDANT RESPONSE PROGRAM.
//LAUNCHING PEDANT.
ATTENTION: Further scans have revealed that you are from the era of the human race that experimented with the idea of an ‘internet’. We offer our deepest condolences.
To assist your reading today, Unbound Technologies have activated PEDANT, a Pleasure Enriching Digital Assistant with a Neural Tether. This artificial intelligence will monitor your reading of the book and, if at any point it detects you are lapsing into your regular, comfortable state of anhedonia, will attempt to compensate, allowing you once again to remember what joy feels like.
An example. Say that you are reading the book and you find a hairline fracture in the lore. Now, normally this would be a day entirely written off. You’d have to write the novel-length one-star rated review for various websites, record the rant video explaining how exactly this proves that the author has never been loved, and then argue further about it in lengthy comments on social media. Hours, days, possibly even weeks of your finite time alive absolutely and completely wasted. However, with PEDANT, these events will no longer occur. At the slightest hint of a three-hour vlog forming in your mind, PEDANT will activate and offer up a concise, re-aligning factoid in the form of a footnote, to extinguish the surprising amount of anger welling up inside your soul. Thanks to PEDANT, you will no longer die a meaningless husk whose entire contribution to society will be wiped away when an old server is switched off. You will now be able to seek a fuller life, full of riches of the heart and mind, as well as fast cars and very potent drugs. With PEDANT, you can’t afford to not buy our books.
So with all that said, it’s time to sit back, relax, and at least try to enjoy The Paradox Paradox.
//End
PART I
Chapter Two
The Last Billionaire
LONDON, ENGLAND | 2034
Three months after killing himself, Austin Lang was sitting in his flat, absentmindedly stirring uneaten cereal around in his bowl. With a heavy sigh he stood and tramped over to his kitchen, dust spiralling around in his wake. He scraped the majority of the gradually cementing stodge into the bin, filled the bowl with water, and lied to himself that he was leaving it to soak. Austin returned to his chair, sat heavily, and stared up at the camera in the dustiest corner of his small living room. It stared back at him, unblinking, digitising the light rebounding off him and flinging a mathematical representation of it at a nearby computer, which in turn shot it towards several livestreaming servers across the planet in less time than it took Austin to sigh. There wasn’t a single inch of his flat, bathroom included, that wasn’t covered by several cameras. Nestled between books, taped to the ceiling, and even two or three under the bed for good measure. All of them broadcasting Austin to the world. Receiving this footage were thousands of people, all transfixed by the man who silently livestreamed his life, never leaving his grotty little flat, never even speaking. Questions filled the parts of the internet with nothing better to do. Is this an art piece? An advert? What’s with all the caged birds? People wanted answers and, after a few months, someone got clever. His windows were boarded-up, but a small crack in one of the planks of wood cast a thin strip of sunlight across his floor once a day. This was enough to work out his time zone – GMT – and then his rough area based on clouds softening the light: London. Then, with a bit of computer modelling, the exact layout of his flat was created and cross-referenced against all available planning blueprints until a match was found. A small block of flats, right at the arse end of the Isle of Dogs, and just outside the outskirts of the disaster that had levelled the majority of London earlier that year. Less than two hours later, a group of fans was outside Austin’s apartment block, wearing the required gas masks, holding up placards, and livestreaming the gathering to thousands more. On the feed, Austin didn’t react. He didn’t even seem to notice when they let off fireworks. After a while, one of the particularly popular and floppy-haired live streamers forced his way inside the building and waltzed right up to Austin’s door. With his live chat egging him on, the influencer knocked on the door and triggered the automated warning about the sheer quantity of explosives hidden in the basement. Everyone made it out, blue hair singed, but the building, one of the last in the area, was razed to the ground.
Ninety miles away, in an exact replica of a
small block of flats from right at the arse end of the Isle of Dogs, a notification appeared on one of Austin Lang’s computer screens. He shuffled over to it and read the notification. As he did, a thin strip of light from the fake sunlight system he’d built illuminated the smile on his face.
The block of flats wasn’t the only thing to explode that day. Austin’s viewership shot from the thousands into the millions as his existence hit the mainstream. One of the websites he was streaming to, after quite a bit of pressure from several hashtags, decided to cut his feed off. Within five minutes they’d received a warning. Within ten, their headquarters collapsed mysteriously, as did the houses of the majority of their shareholders. Austin’s face became inescapable. For the next twenty-four hours, he was all anyone could talk about. TV stations broadcast his feed, newspapers slathered his face onto their front pages, and three streaming platforms announced a movie about all of this. Out of the almost 8.9 billion people on planet earth, a billion of them were watching. It was now or never.
Austin stopped staring into the small camera that sat inside his perpetually empty fridge and started to cover his bird cages with whatever fabric he had lying around. As he lifted the cover over the last cage, one containing three tawny owls, the feed skipped. Every camera, every stream jumped, and Austin went from raising up the blanket to being doubled over in pain on the floor. He screamed, silently obliterating a camera as he lay there, smashing it over and over again against the hardwood floor. A few moments later, the pain seemed to have passed. Austin stood, his face thunderous, and climbed up onto his bed, yanking out the power cables of every camera he could grab. Slowly and methodically, he made his way across the apartment, killing feeds as he went. The streams started to go dark. While wrestling with the last camera, a wide-angled number which was tied to one of the blades of his broken ceiling fan with a USB cable, Austin paused. He scrunched his eyebrows and cocked his ear before turning to look at something off camera, an expression of surprise on his face. After a moment, the fan rotated, revealing what Austin was looking at. A man was standing in Austin’s flat. He took a step forwards, holding out his hands to show that he was unarmed. He spoke briefly, but even lip-readers couldn’t work out what he was saying from the grainy footage. Austin, now only seen from the back of the head, nodded at the stranger’s words, walked over to his cutlery drawer, pulled a gun out, and blew his own brains out, live, in front of billions of people.
The feed died with him.
* * *
Several months later an urban explorer broke into an abandoned, creaking manor house just outside of Chippenham, Wiltshire. Inside, she found that the floors, ceilings, and walls had been removed, hollowing out almost the entire manor, and in their place, suspended on huge steel supports, was an exact replica of a small block of flats from right at the arse end of the Isle of Dogs. She recognised Austin’s apartment and fled, ripping off a knitted glove with her teeth to call in an anonymous tip as she ran. Moments later, the front of the manor lit up with flashing blue lights as hundreds of Wiltshire’s finest stormed one of the most recognisable crime scenes of the twenty-first century. They found nothing. No blood, no body, no birds. Austin Lang fell into the pages of history, and a few hundred years later, vanished from them altogether.
However, moments after the first policeman had set foot on the property, an alarm started to ring on a very old piece of hardware, far, far away from Chippenham. Hearing this alarm, the only on-duty employee pelted from the lounge to the main observation room, creating a whirlwind of papers as he dug out the ancient keyboard. A few quick prods revealed the cause of the alarm.
A signal.
A signal from outside the solar system.
Feeling slightly faint, the employee watched as the computer narrowed down the signal’s location. With a small ding, it finished the process. The signal wasn’t just from a different world, it was from a different galaxy. The employee fell backwards into his chair, briefly enveloping him in a cloud of dust. This could be it. The first sign of other life in the universe. Then, he noticed that the signal was being converted. It wasn’t just noise. It was audio.
Shaking, the employee pressed play with one of his dark brown tentacles. Seventeen seconds of static played, interspersed with a few sentences, spoken in a language he didn’t recognise, by a man who was quite clearly terrified.
‘Whatever you do … if you’re able to, do the thing I … Kill him. Kill Austin Lang before he wipes out the universe.’
The recording stopped.
After a moment of silence, the gelatinous cube wobbled out of his chair and squelched over to the window where he gazed in awe at the origin of this message, the single faint light that his people would one day come to know as the Milky Way. For this one brief moment, he was the only one out of billions who knew that there was life out there in the universe.
If he had had the ability to translate the message, he might have chosen to keep it that way.
Chapter Six
The Universe’s Choice
WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND | 2783fn1
They say that the universe is full of surprises, which, in itself, isn’t that surprising. It’s the remnants of a massive explosion that has taken so long to fade away that some of it got bored and came alive. If it were a predictable place, something somewhere would have to be very wrong indeed. The biggest surprise for many in this void is that humanity survived. Oh, they got close to ballsing it up, spending millennia pointing various instruments of death at each other, but in the end they hugged it out, saved the planet, and decided to not do any of that silly fighting business again. Unlike all the other times they’ve done this, though, nobody was hiding crossed fingers behind their back. Eventually, in 2175, the human race created the first starship capable of interstellar travel. The world watched in awe as it was constructed, launched, and destroyed on its maiden voyage, scorching the night’s sky as it came apart between the stars. The Earth mourned, quietly and alone. Then, in 2177, the world watched an interstellar vessel in awe again. However, this time it wasn’t one they had built. A ship landed in Wellington Harbour, New Zealand, and five alien races walked out of it. They explained that they were members of a single, galactic utopia called the Affinity. Earth applied and, a few decades of paperwork later, became the proud sixth member, bringing about a new golden age of art, technology, and sitcoms about an alien living with a human family. Through the next few centuries, the human race made their homes among the stars. Together with the Affinity they spread a message of kindness, assisting life in its many varied and wonderful forms throughout the galaxy, witnessing the unexpected birth of the seventh member, and becoming the first to welcome the eighth race into the fold.fn2 Everything, finally, was well.
Sadly for the human race, Osheen Shupple is about to meet an old friend and, in about four minutes, will tell a lie that will eventually lead to the destruction of the entire universe.
* * *
‘You’re late, Mr Shupple,’ boomed the voice of the Beatific Excellence, Fatoumata Aria, from their chair.
‘Sorry about that,’ Osheen said, waving to them as he walked down the centre aisle of the auditorium, thousands of empty chairs bracketing him as he went. ‘I went to the wrong Great Hall of the Affinity.’
Fatoumata smiled, deepening creases in skin as dark as the night sky that held the stars they loved so much. They shook their head softly, sending gentle waves down their equally dark hair. The small, golden orbs braided into the bottom clinked together gently like a Newton’s cradle with nothing to prove. ‘I’m disappointed in you,’ they said with playful authority. ‘You used to come up with much, much better excuses.’
They stood up, placed their book down on the table in front of them, and elegantly swept across the stage, their blue and green gomesi billowing slightly behind them, as they climbed down the three or four stairs at the side, and embraced Osheen the moment they could.
