Venomous Lumpsucker

by Ned Beauman

In other words, he was planning to roofie the orangutan.

Then there was karaoke, which was popular on board. But Resaint was barred from karaoke sessions by her most deeply held beliefs, in the sense that she believed karaoke ought to be a taboo punishable by stoning.

The sound of impact had been just one sharp drum hit, but somehow also symphonic – deep and wet and ruptive and sproingy all at the same time, really remarkable Foley work on the tumour’s part – and yet in terms of textural horror the sound had nothing on the image.

Like a neurodegenerative disease, extinction was a slow hollowing, not a sharp cut. The death of the last holdout was in some sense a mere formality.

like a prosthesis fitted over a perfectly healthy limb so it could shrivel from disuse inside the plastic casing. When she’d done her masters, she’d believed that artificial intelligence was about computer minds ascending into personhood, but this was more about human minds decaying out of it.

The upside, in theory, was that nobody possibly could take this work so seriously that they would expect her to dedicate every fibre of her being to it; except the unbelievable reality was that they did.

it was a nostalgia corroborated in its melancholy by the certain knowledge that the past really was a lot better.

After all, he couldn’t eat pandas, or glaciers, or Jakarta.

One of the terrors of this era, to people like Halyard, was the suddenness with which life could become physical. Imagine that, because of your economic position, you are safe and serene and almost untethered to the earth. Your body is nothing, really: it’s just the part of you that gets tired at the gym, the part of you that will be shucked into a furnace after your connectome is uploaded. And then, overnight, your body becomes primary again, because your home is flooded or burned or buried or confiscated, and you are plunged into a life of physical degradation, physical constraint, physical danger.

but you couldn’t shoot meat at a complicated structural issue,

only a very advanced species would be capable of something so useless.

After all, the vast majority of animals on earth were extremely parochial parasites. Almost every species visible to the naked eye had at least one parasite that was specific to that species and could survive nowhere but its body; often it had several such dependants and sub-dependants (‘. . . and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so on ad infinitum’). Nobody gave a shit about any of those. You could tell because, when the WCSE had resolved early on to exempt all such microscopic parasites from its purview, essentially rendering them nonpersons, not even the most radical greens had so much as muttered in protest. They had about as much value in their own right as a proprietary cable for some discontinued smartphone.

The truth was, most of the time, talking to a chimpanzee was more like talking to a child than it was like talking to an alien; which is to say, it was like talking to a very stupid adult. That was all.

Evolution was a monstrous maker, a blind heedless thing inching along in no particular direction, the whole disaster fuelled by spilled blood and wasted effort, Amazon rivers of both. All of it was premised on random mutation, which was like editing a novel by simply copying it out again and again in the hope that the typos you made would not just spare the meaning but actually render new insight. What could be more absurd?

Global stock markets, rattled by the hacking of the unhackable, were down about a third of a percent, comparable to a rogue state testing a nuclear bomb or a major economy electing a mildly left-wing government.

We’re looking for this fish,’ he said. Wilson’s face fell. ‘I’m awfully sorry, but we ate it.’ ‘Um, no—’ ‘That’s the main reason we were cooking it, to be quite honest with you. I wish we’d known. Have you come a long way?’ Resaint explained that they weren’t looking for that fillet in particular, but for the species in general. ‘Oh! Well, I bought that fish from Gareth. He’s a fisherman, so you’d have to ask him precisely where he scooped it up, but in terms of what I can tell you, I’d say a ninety-nine per cent chance it was the sea. The one per cent is in case he acquired it by some other means, which I can’t altogether rule out, but his general modus operandi is that he catches fish in the sea.’

The barrier spits to the east were featureless but for Red Army gravesites, which made you wonder if they’d fought that war just so they’d have somewhere to put their dead from fighting it.

‘Christ, you people never stop talking about your ten thousand a year, it’s like being in fucking Jane Austen.

‘But the universe is bloody huge – stuff like that must happen every minute. You can’t go on strike over it. Honestly it sounds to me to like your real enemy isn’t climate change or habitat loss, it’s entropy. You don’t like the idea that everything eventually crumbles. Well, it does. If you’re this worried about species extinction, wait until you hear about the heat death of the universe.’

It was a bit like how you wouldn’t strangle your own baby for crying in a restaurant but you’d strangle someone else’s.

Wittgenstein, when he was contemplating suicide, had summed up the mindset as ‘the state of not being able to get over a particular fact.’ As she’d said so many times to Halyard, she wasn’t suicidal – and yet that fit her pretty well. Everything was broken. The only remaining valid actions were those taken in reaction to that fact, and they were valid only in proportion to the honesty and completeness of the reaction.

From then on things felt awfully drastic. I began to think about all sorts of escapes. I considered everything. I even considered the United States.’ Everybody but her looked at the floor. The avoidance of any direct reference to that country – a custom adopted in the late 2020s out of sheer embarrassment – was these days so strictly observed that for Resaint it was genuinely startling to hear somebody say the words. But of course in the Hermit Kingdom they would not have the same modes of etiquette.

‘Recently I’ve been sort of flirting with the idea of becoming an international fugitive. But this has made me realise I definitely don’t have what it takes. It’s like when I thought I could get into kickboxing.

What was the furthest you could travel on a whim with a romantic interest you barely knew without giving the impression that you planned to elope or go on a killing spree together?

I think you ought to ask yourself whether these things are universal truths about the human psyche or whether they might actually be quite idiosyncratic to you.’