The Path of a Man

The annoying red light on the dash board wouldn’t stop blinking. Carser tapped it hopefully a couple of times, then banged the dash with his fist; Lex had said the ship was old and some of the wiring needed replacing. The red light kept flashing, now accompanied by an unpleasant whine.

“Lex! Lex, get out here. We’ve got a problem with the Subjectivity Drive.”

“What’s happening?” Lex’s voice came through, muffled, from the rear compartment.

“There’s a flashing red light and it’s making a violent whining noise.”

Lex stretched his head round the portal way and glanced across the dashboard, “Have you switched on the Heisenberg Momentum Randomiser?”

“Ah… yeah, the ah… I’ll just do that.”

“Good idea, preferably before we get smeared across the galaxy in five dimensions.”

Carser flipped up a safety cover and toggled the HMR switch on. The flashing red light abruptly changed to green, and a quiet, escalating hum started.

“Right, we’re good to go.”

Lex nodded to him, “I’ll get The Idiot.”

Carser groaned, “That’s the worst thing about space travel.”

Shortly Lex returned, accompanied by a young man who looked to be in his early twenties. He affected a moppy blond hairstyle paired with a quasi-conservative suit. And white sneakers.

“Yah, it’s all just a big conspiricah, yah? They all just want us to stay complahtly in the dark, yah.”

“Absolutely Simon, you’re bang on again,” said Lex. “Now you just take your seat, and we’ll get you strapped in – you too Carser.”

“O-ah,” Simon looked across at Carser, slightly surprised, “are you still har?”

Carser gritted his teeth. Of course he was still here; they were in the middle of space, it wasn’t like he could jump out at the next station. But he dared not say that, they needed The Idiot.

Lex strapped Simon into the centre seat and handed him two small copper balls. Then he placed a large helmet over Simon’s head, with wires stretching to the console. Once he’d taken his own seat and strapped in, he said, “Now Simon listen carefully, we’re heading towards Earth, near the star called Sol, sometimes called The Sun, or Zyliskyzyx.”

“Oh yah man, I know how to get thar.”

“Are you sure? It’s in the Orion Arm, right next to Proxima Centauri.”

Simon waved him away impatiently, “Yar I’m sure, yar.”

The hum from the console was growing louder and more high pitched. Lex and Carser watched Simon as he sat back in the seat, holding the copper balls. Lex held his hand just above a large red button on the console, waiting anxiously. Simon twitched a couple of times, then shouted, “Now!” and Lex slammed his hand down on the button.

Carser suddenly felt exactly as if his whole body was being stretched across a hippopotamus’s bottom, then pelted with porridge. Space and time contorted violently, centred on a pool of calm that was Simon. He felt the urge to express his displeasure with the situation:

“Oh Shee…”

Excerpt from the Space Pilot’s Operations Manual [Translated from High Pejorative, badly]

Space is very, very big. Bigger than you can even imagine. So big in fact that trying to travel through space, even at light speed, is pointless. The Subjectivity Drive is a way of traveling across those distances by not actually bothering to. Instead we use the subjective nature of sentience and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal.

Quite simply, we place a particle inside a Kronixial Abrogation Chamber – available at any good hardware store – allowing us to accurately measure the particle’s momentum. Then we apply multi-vectorial randomized forces. (No this is not the same as vigorously shaking a box around, no it’s not. And I’m right because I’m wearing a white lab coat, so there.) This creates large, rapid changes in momentum which are accurately measured, and, due to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal, induces a field of positional uncertainty around the particle that expands to the size of the ship as the box shakes more; I mean, as the multi-vectoral forces increase.

We then apply absolute certainty about our position, drawn from our inability to understand space and time, coupled with the belief that we are somehow significant. This causes the uncertainty wave to collapse at the new location we’re certain we’re at; i.e. we move the ship by deciding it’s already where we want to be. This requires a sentient being who understands space exists, but who is so woefully ignorant of reality, they can assume stars that are light years away, are in fact just round the metaphorical corner. This is where The Idiot comes in. They are trained in special, privately run schools, that convince them of their own superiority on every subject so they can calmly ignore science, expertise, and plain common sense.

The upside of the Subjectivity Drive is that you can travel immeasurably vast distances instantly. The downside is that a significant portion of your navigation depends on a complete idiot who’s always convinced he’s right.

“…eeyit!”

The ship appeared above a mid-sized, pale blue world. Carser gazed fondly down at it. He’d been worried about getting home, but it appeared it was easier than expected, disregarding the sensory experience akin to being stretched across a hippopotamus’s bottom. It was also cheaper than expected; the transit charge from Lex was less than a thousand dollars.

“Well, better look at paying you then,” he said to Lex.

“Uh, well. Maybe, first just look in the other direction.”

“What?”

“As in over there, at the system’s central star.”

Carser turned to where Lex gestured and saw, not the familiar yellow-white star he expected, but instead, a large violently blue and purple star that seemed altogether too angry to promote life on any of its orbiting planets. He frowned at Simon.

“So, not Earth. You appear to have brought me somewhere completely different from Earth.”

“Oh yah man. This is whar you asked me to take you.”

“No I didn’t, I said ‘Earth’, very distinctly. And Lex said it too, along with all the other directions about where to find very important things, like the sun, and the solar system.”

“No he didn’t.”

“Aaahhhgg! Yes he did! I was sitting right there. I heard him say it. It’s even on the ship’s recording log!”

“I think thar must be something wrong with your memorah. I’ve heard space travel can do that to people.”

“It’s not my… look, you can just look up the log and see that I’m right.”

Simon’s brow crinkled, “Why would I do that? I’m right.”

“Gaaa, you…you… you Idiot!” He turned away and took several deep breaths.

“So Lex, if this isn’t Earth, where has this Idiot landed us?”

“Just getting the readouts now…Ah that would explain it. This is Driftwood, makes complete sense now, eh?”

“No. It makes no sense whatsoever. How is Driftwood anything like Earth?”

“Oh it’s not like Earth. It’s the home of the scientist-philosopher, Rae Mune Tsun, the Galaxy’s leading expert on planetary underachievement. He’s made a special study of Earth – it made his career. His work can be a bit esoteric at times, but he really is a galaxy class philosopher. Hey, we should go see him!”

“No we shouldn’t! We should go to Earth so I can get home. Besides, why would he see us?”

“Well, he’d love to meet you. I’m mean you’re just such a fantastic example of earthly planetary competence.”

“Great. Now why would I want to go?”

“Because I’ve got to pick up another Kronixial Abrogation Chamber, but the problem is, Driftwood is not a planet, it’s an academic institution encompassing the system. If you’re not here for academic purposes, you have to pay to do a course, otherwise they put you in an orbiting prison and torture you for illegal entry. So I need you to come along to provide an academic pretext, rather than pay for a course.”

Carser still looked unconvinced, “But still, how would he even know we’re here?”

“Oh, I messaged him when I was pretending to wait for the readout of our location. Also, did I mention your other option is staying on the ship with Simon?”

Getting to the planet’s surface took longer than the trip to reach the Driftwood system, mainly because Lex was driving. He kept getting distracted by things: other ships he would hail indiscriminately, interesting geological features of the planet, and on one occasion, a large butterfly. Despite this they eventually made it to the surface, and then to the offices of Galactic Professor Rae Mune Tsun, one of a row of broad-windowed, attractive looking facades, with fluted columns of marble and sandstone. Carson noted that the adjacent doors’ nameplates carried strings of letters after each name, but Rae Mune Tsun’s carried only his name.

“How can he be so good if he doesn’t have the qualifications all these others do?”

“Ah, that’s part of his amazingness see. He says, ‘let others append their names with the whiskers of verisimilitude to support their narrative, Rae Mune Tsun shall remain glabrous and convincing.’ Some people say he’s the wisest person in Driftwood.”

Carson sighed, “Well let’s get on with it then.”

Rae Mune Tsun turned out to be a small, elderly gentleman of Asian appearance, wearing some sort of ornate, white linen toga. He was bald with long white moustaches and a beard.

“Professor Tsun, such an honour to meet you. Great fan of your work, great fan, particularly on the evolution of third-rate alloying principals during the Lesser Ignoramus Period in the Slumph System.”

“An honour? Indeed, one should always seek peaceful meeting, for in every such meeting is honour,” he turned to Carser, “do you not agree?”

“Um…yes?”

“Ah, to know one does not know; important step on path to wisdom,” Rae Mune Tsun gestured with a forefinger.

“Well, the path to wisdom is fine, but I’m more interested in the path to home.”

“Mm, do we not all seek path home, for are we not all lost?”

Carser frowned slightly, glanced at Lex then back to Rae Mune Tsun, “Um… look I’m sorry, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but everything you say, it really sounds like something from a fortune cookie. And, my God man, could you be anymore ridiculously stereotypical ‘wise Chinese elder’ with that look? I mean, it’s as if I’ve stumbled into some old British movie like The King and I.”

Rae Mune Tsun nodded his head with an inscrutable expression and stroked his beard.

“Gaah, you’re doing it again. Stop it! How come you’re…” Carser turned to Lex, “how come he’s Chinese anyway? This is space.”

“Ahh,” nodded Rae Mune Tsun sagely, “you come by Subjectivity Drive.”

Carser shrugged, “Sure. What other way is there?”

“Actually,” muttered Lex, “there are four other ways. The Subjectivity Drive’s just the cheapest.”

“Well what’s it got to do with anything anyway?”

Rae Mune Tsun smiled serenely, “Man driven by Subjectivity, see only what he expect.”

“But I would expect to see an alien, probably with wobbly tentacle legs and too many eye stalks.”

“Really? When you hear my name, Rae Mune Tsun, did you straight away think, ‘Ah, he is wobbly eyeball alien’, or did you really think, a-small Chinese man?”

“But what I think doesn’t matter, what matters is what’s really there.”

“Ha! Here, you at centre of great philosophy school. And of course some idiot think he clever by applying a high voltage post-modernist neuro-projector. And of course it get stuck. And I bloody stuck looking like this when people see me!”

“Oh, sorry.”

“It ok. Could be stuck looking like you. Beside you here now, so I can fix. Long time I searched for stupidest planet, and Earth might be it. Now I can change how people see me. All I need do is change your brain.”

“Ah, you mean change my mind.”

“No, no. I know what I mean, and I mean change your brain.”

Carser sighed, “Bugger.”