Avaragado's blog

From the moment he stepped over the pub threshold I knew he’d be trouble, and I knew I’d be his target. Like a granny to an infant, at some point he’d be irresistibly drawn to me and would overwhelm my personal space, his face occluding all the known galaxies, his monster hands wandering uninvited.

He was tall, dark and loathsome. He hulked over the bar, scattering twinks like emo skittles. I saw one fatless wonder look him up and down – well, up and up, and down and down and down – and watched the poor youth’s expression shift from “oh?” to “oh!” to “no!” as realisation dawned.

It was, I swear, Ming the Merciless’s gay twin brother. A little more hair, a little less… imperial, but equally evil and certainly an imminent threat to all life on Earth. All you had to do was strike a match within six feet of him and watch the planet burn.

He spent many minutes prowling the pub, not so much undressing as eviscerating people with his vodka-laser stare. I thought I’d escaped when he loomed over Steve Hum and began delicate negotiations, like China in a bilateral with a small Polynesian archipelago. Steve, no shrinking violet, shrank and turned violet. But the guy moved on, course laid in for David Hale. My heart sank: I knew I was next.

I was on my phone attempting to rattle off a plaintive tweet for help when he sidled/sozzled up and enveloped me in a dense alcoholic drizzle. I would love to report what he said but his Eastern European accent was as thick and impenetrable as his leathery hide, and most of the discernable words refused to parse into anything resembling a sentence. He slurred something about “You have a brain,” with which I was forced to agree. He wanted me to look into his eyes for five seconds; I feared they would spin and spark and render me helpless in his gaze and I’d wake up on Mongo chained to his fox fur throne and dressed like the 1972 Blackpool illuminations, but nothing happened.

“Well, that’s your five seconds.” I returned to my phone to finish the tweet. He cursed my primitive Earthly device in an unfamiliar tongue so I adopted my grown-up-talking-to-child voice and said I needed to send a text. This quieted him, or at least confused him; and while his back was turned I darted away, like a gazelle from a particularly pickled lion, to the relative safety of the bar.

My freedom was fleeting. He spotted me and, by now at least six or seven sheets to the wind, tacked haphazardly in my direction. I made no eye contact, observing Lift/Urinal Protocol One. He bought a drink. In fact he bought two: he pushed one along the bar to me, or perhaps moved the rest of the planet in the other direction, I’m not sure.

“I’m sorry, I’m driving. I already have my one drink.” I smiled nervously, pointing at my Peroni and fully expecting a psychic burst to dash it into the slop bucket.

He leaned in close and slobbered in my ear. “You are very horny guy buuuurp.”

Nothing says classy like audible punctuation. Please, no colons or em dashes.

Behind the bar Alex stood watch. He caught my eye; it’s fine, I said. And it was, in a please-don’t-pull-a-knife kind of a way. I felt no actual threat or intimidation; he was too wasted to be anything other than an irritant, a large Lithuanian bluebottle – emphasis on the bottle – who needed swatting with a newspaper the size of Swansea.

But when he put one arm either side of me on the bar, pinning me there, a line was crossed. My mental Uhura flicked on the flashing red bulb. Enough was enough.

I told him to stop. It was the grown-up voice again. He released me from my drunken dungeon and then started on the “You think I’m ugly” schtick, to which there is no appropriate response, so I said nothing. Instead I turned to the bar staff: “Don’t serve him any more.”

And then he was gone – though sadly not in a puff of pink smoke and a thunderflash, or a poorly executed blue-screen effect. I think he went for a wee. For a time he drifted in and out of the pub, carving a boozy furrow between smokers and toilet; and then finally I sensed a great darkness had lifted. I debriefed with Steve and the bouncer.

“Has the scary man gone away?” I asked.

“I put him in a taxi to Niche or the Fez. Take him anywhere, I said, I don’t care. Just get him away from here.”

And so Ming the Merciless’s gay twin brother, Munt the Relentless, had gone on to terrorise another planet. We had defeated him.

But are we truly free of his mincing menace? Shall we again look evil in the gayface and do battle, twink, otter and bear united against his twatted tyranny? I know one thing: next time we will be ready. Next time we’re putting Queen on the jukebox.

The coach tour took us past the Saturn V: a Giant Redwood prematurely felled, rotting slowly on its side in the damp Florida heat. An unmissable reminder of Nasa’s glory days, then already a decade and a couple of culture shocks past. This one had been built to fly, before Nixon hacked off Apollo’s tail. Apollo 18, or 19, perhaps. It was a monument to success; a symbol of decline. It lived and died for politics.

Not far away, a forest of earlier launchers; still standing, once mighty, now mere saplings. Saturn V engines scattered like mushrooms. Gleaming, wasted mushrooms.

And the Vehicle Assembly Building. So large, I never tired of saying, that clouds formed inside. Down one side, a giant Stars and Stripes. Down another, a massive door, now closed. And inside, I told my Dad, was Columbia. At least that’s what I believed and hoped. I imagined it already hitched to its huge white fuel tank, twin SRBs either side, white-suited technicians crawling all over. I desperately wanted to see it. To see it launch. To launch in it.

A large digital clock confirmed that a launch was a few days away – but not Columbia. The orbiter’s maiden flight was beset by delays, thousands of new systems and processes to build, and test, and shake out – with no Kennedy deadline to meet. The shuttle would be a workhorse, we were told, a quick and cheap route into orbit. They wouldn’t be planting any flags, they’d be supplying a service. A launch a week, said the PR. A fleet of orbiters. I couldn’t wait. We might actually have 2001 by 2001, I thought.

With Nasa’s future cloaked inside the VAB, the tour showed us more of its triumphal past. The Apollo 13 Command Module, success grabbed from the jaws of defeat. An unused Lunar module, another of Nixon’s casualties. Battered training units to clamber over. A wooden lunar rover to pretend to drive. Actual moon rock.

Finally we boarded the coach back to the hotel. A long drive into the setting sun; an undercurrent of travel sickness always threatening to bubble up.

Thirty years on almost to the day, that journey back sums up Nasa’s fortunes. Then, we looked forward to the first shuttle launch. Now, we simply hope that the ageing fleet, two orbiters lost to mismanagement and capricious fate, makes it through the remaining few launches intact to join the Saturn V and its forebears in the museum. Nothing dates as fast as the future.

As in 1980, the Nasa of 2010 is at a turning point. The shuttle programme never delivered on its promises – too much pork, too much CYA, ‘reusable’ orbiters virtually rebuilt between launches – launches themselves costing $500m a pop. But there’s nothing to replace it.

It’s 38 years since men last walked on the moon. Since men last left Earth orbit. By the end of next year Nasa will struggle even to put people into Earth orbit without paying others – Russians, for the time being at least.

This isn’t the future I imagined, as I stood in my short shorts leaning non-nonchalantly against a rocket engine in the October sunshine.

And what future do I imagine now? Where will we be in October 2040? That’s assuming we survive Y2K38, and assuming we’re not all living on rafts or in caves or inside the Matrix or rebelling against our robot overlords or fighting the undead.

Here’s my guess. The US, long divided internally, will likely be two or more independent republics squabbling over once-settled state borders, desperate for oil, struggling in a changed climate. If not underwater, the Kennedy Space Center will be pure museum: the future long past.

But it wouldn’t surprise me to see a presence on the moon. Chinese, of course.

Living in the future is amazing until you have to visit the past. In the past, people had to arrange to meet in advance. Only buildings had telephones, even though nobody wanted to talk to a house or an office. News was disseminated either by dead tree or by Kenneth Kendall at 9 o’clock. Everybody dressed oddly. The music was, though, much better. Songs had words, now it’s just noise, etc.

Walking into a bank brings back that Eighties feeling – just whitewashed with nicer hair, shrubbery and Helvetica Neue. Worse, there’s still a sense that the back office is ruled by a fat man with mutton chops, perhaps played by Harry Secombe, inscribing all transactions using the world’s featheriest quill in a ledger bound with the skin of an entire parish of cows. “Mr Hardworthy? I should be obliged were you to release funds to the value of 3/- to allow Mrs Blenkinsop, a fine and upstanding gentle-lady the size of Wigan, to purchase an ugly hat.”

Mrs Blenkinsop was ahead of me in a bank queue a few weeks ago. The bustle gave it away. She was using it as a parcel shelf.

I’d ventured into the past to close an account that was earning a massive 0% interest and move the money into a new account that would earn me a much better rate, like 0.5%. A simple job, you might think. You might reasonably expect some kind of precedent for this task, perhaps even a well-tested procedure.

And you’d be right. I was attended to courteously and efficiently by a gentleman evidently of a similar nature to myself, deft with the mouse and familiar with the hellhole of cascading popups that seems to constitute banking systems. Account closed, money transferred. Now please sign this piece of paper.

Head office, it appeared, needed some physical authorisation: my presence in a branch, one might even say my biometrics, apparently being insufficiently physical. Two-factor authentication – my card and its PIN in my head – ignored in favour of the single-factor analogue scribble of my signature.

The Time Warp, from Rocky Horror, started playing in my head. It seems Harry Secombe worked at head office instead.

Ah well. Processes, eh? Pfft, tch, etc.

And then a few days later a letter arrived from the bank. “Some important news about your recent letter to us,” it began patronisingly. My signature, I was told, didn’t match their records. I hadn’t sent any letter to them: everything was done in-branch. The scrawl on the form apparently didn’t match the pristine, young person’s signature I’d invented on the spot when opening my first bank account with them aged 16. Not altogether surprising. I was annoyed, though: I’d been in the branch, authenticated by card, pin and gay. Was that not enough?

I returned to the same branch a few days later, The Time Warp now on brain-repeat. I waved the letter in front of a man, who apologised and scurried about making copies of things. It’s just a jump to the left. And then a step to the right. All done, he said. OK: that was easy.

A couple of weeks later a short conversation with a cash machine led me to believe all was not as it appeared. The account I’d supposedly closed used to regularly suck money from my current account into a savings account; the new one didn’t. But it was obvious from my balance that money had been recently sucked.

My first thought: it’s gone into a black hole. They’ve closed the account but not the suckage. If not that, then they haven’t closed the account at all.

I went to the branch again. Helpfully I spoke to the advisor who’d tried to close the account originally. He remembered me. With your hand on your hips. You bring your knees in tight. We went through the account closure process again – the sucked money wasn’t in a black hole, thankfully. I signed the form again. We tsked and pffted about processes and head offices again. It was Groundhog Gay.

And then a few days ago, I received a letter from the bank. “Some important news about your recent letter to us.” I was shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that – you’ll never guess – my signature didn’t match their records.

Three attempts so far to close an account. Several weeks doing lengths in the custard pool, unable to overcome the drag of Harry Secombe’s sideburns.

Later today I’ll make another trip into the past, to queue with Mrs Blenkinsop, her bustle and her new ugly hat, to discover what excuse they’ll offer this time. I could threaten to withdraw all my money and go elsewhere, but I’d only get another letter failing to recognise my signature. This time I have a secret weapon: this time they get the pelvic thrusts.

The queue pushed and swayed, a dozen or more excited school kids chattering about what lay behind the door. It was early September 1980 – the first or second week of term, my first term of secondary school. I queued with a friend from many years before who I’d bumped in to again a few weeks earlier. He’d told me then that he’d been learning about computers. I’d never used one; they sounded interesting. The queue was for Computer Club.

Behind the door, eventually, we found two computers: a Research Machines 380Z plugged into a large black-and-white TV on a trolley and with a keyboard seemingly made of wrought iron; and a Tandy TRS-80 with a green-screen monitor, an altogether sexier beast. Model I, Level II BASIC, 16K RAM. Pixel resolution of 128×48. Tape storage. No lower case characters. Awesome. The potential! The thrill!

We sat on the playing field afterwards, the school dozing into silence for the evening but the two of us buzzing.

“I want to learn how to program,” I said.

“I’ll lend you a book. I’ve written some programs already. Easy really.”

“What do they do?”

“One does hangman. In theory. It’s only on paper, but it looks right.” He didn’t have a computer yet.

“You going to sell it?”

“Not this one. I have plans though.”

“Breakout? Space Invaders?” The TRS-80 wasn’t capable enough for Defender, that much was obvious.

He paused, and rubbed his face all over in that way that he had. “Tell me about the future.”

“The Space Shuttle!” Columbia’s maiden flight was due in a few months. It had already been delayed several times. I was a little obsessed.

“An evolutionary dead end.” A wave of the hand, dismissed.

“A flight a week, NASA says, and–”

“Not gonna happen. They have to say that to get the money. But I’m talking about computers. What will they be like in five years, ten years? Thirty?”

I was eleven. Five months was a long time. Five years? ‘O’ Levels, I guess. I’d probably have a girlfriend. Ten years? Thirty? No idea. Oh – I’d have a family, and a moustache. That’s all I knew. A thought struck. “Positronic brains. The Three Laws of Robotics. ” Asimov was another obsession. “C-3PO, human-cyborg relations.” And Star Wars.

“So compared to the TRS-80?”

“Much more powerful: smaller, faster, intelligent.”

“Smaller, faster, but not intelligent. And add ‘cheaper’.”

“Smaller, faster, cheaper. Is that it? No robots?”

He paused again, longer this time. It was getting chilly. The tall trees bordering the playing field caught the breeze and danced. He turned towards me, pivoting his whole body on the grass. “Let’s talk about evolution.” I hated it when he changed the subject like that. “What happened when the first life evolved to survive on the land?”

“They took over. They had the place to themselves. Plants, insects, amphibians, reptiles, rarrrrgh!, birds, mammals, Thatcher.”

“Wave after wave. More sophisticated species replacing or dominating or eating less sophisticated species. More or less. A food chain. Symbiosis. Co-evolution.” I barely understood the words he was using. I realised he’d been learning about more than just computers. “Bees and flowers, hunter and hunted, even humans and dogs.” He was excited and gesticulating now, eyes bright in the gathering gloom. “All it took – all it took – was a foothold. A trailblazer. A simple species making an adventurous leap.”

“I see.” I didn’t see.

“That TRS-80, that 380Z.” Back onto computers again! Christ! “They are the trailblazers. The algal scum clinging to life at the edge of a Paleozoic pool.”

“Oh, I see!” I saw. And I wished I could talk like that.

“They are the… the quantum leap. In five years much more sophisticated species of computer will exist. An explosion of architectures, of forms.” He spoke too fast for his mouth, flecks of spittle leaping free. “Faster, smaller, cheaper. Colonising homes like lichen, moss, plants, flowers. And where you have plants, you have pollination – and eventually pollinators, like–”

“Bees!”

“Which in computer terms, means…”

“Taking pollen from one computer to another. Moving stuff around. Computers that talk to each other!”

“Exactly. Exactly. And we already have those. Heard of Prestel? And at airports, they type your name into a terminal that’s connected to a central computer. Universities have these networks too, linked all over the world.”

This was news to me. “The bees are already here.” Buzzing indeed.

“Simple bees, yes. Wait a few years – ten at most – and they’ll be faster, more agile. Then eventually birds, swooping and soaring, the networks going faster even as the plant computers grow more powerful.” That glint again. “Ever more connected, through wires and radio waves, and located by satellites. Millions of times more powerful, millions of times faster, everywhere in the world. And they all merge – the bees and the birds and the mammals including us humans are all computers too.”

The analogy exploded in my head. “But what do you mean, humans? Bees and pollen, networks, yes. Humans?”

“Simple designs but complex, cascading, unpredictable effects. Bees do a couple of things well, birds more, humans much much more. You reach a point where it all grows exponentially, the sophistication of huge brains interconnecting over what is really a very simple system. At its core, deep down, we’re all just hyper-mega-intelligent cylinders of flesh.”

“Ah, right! Of course! So this global network of the future, then, is really just an enormous, interconnected… series of tubes?”