ANTimatter

“Oh my god. This is gonna be weird. It’s like we’re inside a glow-worm!”

“You don’t get glow-worms in outer space.”

“It’s twisting and… uh, wait, it’s getting smaller. And darker. Maybe we’re inside some kind of ghastly space bobbit worm.”

“What the ’ell’s a bobbit worm?”

“I used to have one in my fish tank. Uh oh. It’s got very dark. Woh-oh-oh-oh-aaaaaarghhh! Now we’re on the outside of it!”

“It’s not a bobbit worm.”

“Are we dead or alive right now? Is this like Schrödinger’s box? What do people think? Am I dead or alive?”

“Both, if you ask me. And it’s obviously not a box.”

“I mean, y’know, conceptually? Wait, I can see a light! There’s a pinpoint of light straight up ahead.”

“Don’t say it. Please don’t say there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Uh oh! Oh no!”

“What is it?”

“Damn!”

If you’re going to travel by wormhole, don’t be drinking beer and eating crisps. I found that out the hard way. So, yeah, wormhole travel - popping down one of those ol’ cosmological plugholes. What did I imagine it to be like? To be honest, when we set out from Earth, heading for the small circumbinary planet known as Smolin9 in the Andromeda galaxy, I was clueless. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Well, of course, I’d made an assumption or two. Everyone does, don’t they? So, this was my main assumption: I thought it’d be like sailing through a trippy, swirling, psychedelic tunnel while floaty orchestral melodies competed with choral chanting in a soul-caressing abstract audio soup. With maybe a bit of the outro to the Beatles’ ‘Day In The Life’ thrown in for good measure. I fully realise that that depiction may not be as good as some of the ones you encounter in the movies and stuff, but hey. Anyway, whatever. As it turns out, wormhole travel isn’t anything like that at all. There’s a tunnel, yes. But sometimes you’re inside it and sometimes you’re kind of riding on the outside of it. Nothing is even remotely psychedelic and there is definitely no music. Nothing could have been further removed from my expectation.

The closest analogy I can come up with is that it’s like being propelled into the steepest bend and drop on a roller coaster. And you’re not strapped in. And there’s no hand rail. Okay, I’ll admit it, I’ve never actually been on a roller coaster. But I’ve been on a simulator. Anyway, regardless whether real or simulated, traveling by wormhole is actually like going on a roller coaster that just plain refuses to flatten out. Well, I suppose worse things happen in space – with wormholes, at least it’s not rocket science, so you don’t burn up on re-entry.

Wait, I mustn’t get ahead of myself. I mentioned the Andromeda Galaxy, right? Well, actually, the Andromeda Galaxy is really the M31. No, seriously, if we’re going to be precise (and we are), the Andromeda Galaxy is known to astronomers as Messier 31 or M31. I know this because I worked on a project known as RECONNECT. It was established in 2090 to seek out signals from intelligent extra-terrestrial civilisations. My role had provided me with quite a bit of detailed knowledge about M31, a vast cosmic dance that I might otherwise have confused with a Bracknell bypass. But I tell you what, I couldn’t say any of that knowledge had proved particularly useful up to that point. But just to show that I’d paid some attention to what my scientist colleagues had told me, I’ll tell you some stuff about it. M31 is big. I mean literally big. It boasts around a trillion stars, compared with the Milky Way which only has around two to four hundred billion. With an apparent magnitude of 3.4, it’s bright enough to be seen from Earth with the naked eye on moonless nights. Without wishing to alarm you, I should point out that M31 is approaching the Milky Way at a rate of around 68 miles per second and, in a mere three or four billion years’ time, the two will merge to form a single giant elliptical galaxy. So, don’t say I didn’t warn you! To help you prepare for this momentous event, I’ll maybe provide some more background information later. Actually, now I think about it, the planet may be in a different constellation. Cygnus, possibly. Yes, sorry, it’s Cygnus. So, it’s okay, you can forget about Andromeda and all that doomsday stuff. Besides, we’ve got about three and a half billion years to come up with an escape plan before the two galaxies collide.

As I tried to haul myself to my feet, it was like my legs just melted underneath me. My landing gear was toast!

“Oh my god!” Aysha exclaimed. “That was ’orrendous!”

I nodded and yawned. For some reason, neither of us could stop yawning. I also had a headache and my vision was blurry. “It was like... hmm, it was like...” At that point, the roller coaster analogy hadn’t occurred to me and I couldn’t express what it was like at all. It was about as definable as love or the human condition or those witty ripostes that disappear as soon as you need them.

“Well,” Aysha interrupted, “I s’pose you’d expect some physical discomfort when you get sucked into a dimensional anomaly in the time-space continuum, wouldn’t you? Anyway, it’s all over now.”

“Is it though? If it was time travel, perhaps it’s in the future,” I objected, flinching as she aimed a punch at my shoulder. The roller coaster analogy now careered into my head at a frightening speed. “Yeah, you feel like screaming, but you don’t have a voice. In fact, it’s kind of like you don’t even have a body, let alone a voice. And then there’s that moment when you realise it’s definitely not just a simulator.”

Aysha regarded me with a quizzical look. And yawned. “A simulator?” she queried. “What the ‘ell are you talkin’ about? By the way, you were screamin’. And shoutin’ out. I could ’ear you all the time.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, she said, “At least, I assume that was you callin’ out for a pillow and a blanket? And a vodka and orange? And, uh, barf bags?”

I nodded. That had been right at the start of the trip, before the whole thing had got seriously scary and weird, before everything had become stripped of tangible reality, before we’d been bombarded with sense stimuli - sounds, images, smells, tastes. None of it had offered any kind of coherent narrative, none of it had fitted into a rational pattern. Were those even external stimuli? I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. Some other pretty bad stuff happened too. Unsavoury stuff. Don’t make me go there. Before long, my brain had started to lose its grip. Memories had started flashing by in a Groundhog Day loop of random recollected moments. To give you an example of what I mean - my dog died eight times during the trip!

Years later, I described the experience to someone in a bar who flatly refused to believe it. He told me that what I had experienced was a common psychic phenomenon – the ‘falling dream’. It is, he explained, an indication of insecurity, instability or anxiety. In some aspect of my waking life, he told me, I must have felt emotionally overwhelmed or unsafe or out of control. According to this guy, a falling dream may also reflect a sense of failure or inferiority, a feeling that you don’t measure up to people’s expectations. Not content with that, he launched into a spirited exposition of Freudian theory and accused me of the most arcane urges and impulses imaginable. He seemed particularly keen to establish how I had landed. Had I landed on my back? Or had my hands broken my fall? Or had I landed in water?

Well, the thing is, it wasn’t a dream, falling or otherwise, and, when the spheroidal mouth of the wormhole had finally disgorged us, there we were - sprawled out on a heavily textured grey magma floor, yawning like basking seals. I noticed Aysha’s face was swollen and puffy as if she’d just gone twelve rounds in a boxing ring. Her eyes were red as if she had been crying for hours, but there was no evidence of any tears.

“It was like being turned inside out!” I said, still struggling to exercise some control over my legs.

“Yeah, okay,” said Aysha, grimacing slightly at my exaggeration.

I was all like roller coasters and barf bags and dead dogs and being turned inside out. How could Aysha behave like we had just stepped off a number 26 bus? “Like being turned inside out!” I repeated, determined to get more of a reaction. “And feeling incredibly itchy all over and you can’t scratch it because...”

“’Cause your skin’s on the inside?” Aysha suggested.

“Yeah. And your internal organs are on the outside!” I was starting to relish the hyperbole now. “And all the loose change comes out of your pockets! Yeah, that’s the worst bit - all your loose change comes out and coins are like flying around, hitting your organs! And you’re like, hey, I’ve lost all my change!”

Aysha looked at me askance. “Hmm. Really?” Hauling herself to her feet, she frowned at me. “Your loose change? Don’t you think if you’d been turned inside out, you might ‘ave more to worry about than losin’ your loose change? Anyway, it’s not you that gets turned inside out. It’s space-time itself. In a wormhole, space-time is so curved that it kinda doubles back on itself.”

I stood up, took a slow and overly exaggerated stride and said, “That’s one small step for…” It was one giant dig in the ribs for me as Aysha put paid to my clowning around. I don’t know if it was the blow from her fist or all the talk about barf bags, but a pang of nausea welled up and I started sweating profusely. The weightlessness you encounter during wormhole travel completely confuses your body. Your inner ear cannot reliably judge up from down and your balance gets thrown out of whack. I moved my head too quickly, my stomach flipped and before I could do anything about it, my whole body heaved and I was back on my knees, vomiting like crazy.

I suppose I should tell you a bit about how we came to be in this pickle. And it wasn’t by means of any contraption I’d built in my garden shed. As I mentioned before, I’d been involved in a project on Earth called RECONNECT, conceived to facilitate scientific research into intelligent alien life in the wake of my grandmother’s encounters with extra-terrestrials during the early part of the twenty-first century.

Actually, I need to take you back a bit further in time. Some of you may be aware that Voyager 1 was launched by NASA way back in 1977? Well, that space probe, along with its golden record containing greetings, pictures and audio-visual information from Earth, eventually got picked up by a pair of itinerant spacecombers from a planet known as Morys Minor. As a direct consequence, one of them, smolin9, visited Earth to determine its suitability for colonisation. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, our beloved planet got rejected, because, apparently (and, I suppose, not surprisingly), it exceeded volatility thresholds. You’re not going to believe this, but during his time on Earth, smolin9 married my grandmother, Melinda Hill of Camden in London, and the pair of them travelled by wormhole to Morys Minor. To her amazement, she was obliged to undergo a surgical procedure relating to her heart tissue (essential for the production of special blue blood cells required for survival on the planet). She didn’t find out until it was too late, but such operations were irreversible. It meant she could not return to Earth, unless she could find a Mortian heart donor - apparently, Mortian hearts function perfectly on both Morys Minor and Earth. Luckily, the situation resolved itself when an extraordinary set of misunderstandings led to smolin9’s associate, polkingbeal67, swapping hearts with her.

You’re still with me, right? Well, her situation became even stranger when, for some curious reason, the ancient, ailing Mortian leader decided to name her (my grandmother) as his successor. Long story short, a random series of events led to the tragic death of smolin9, and the planet was subsequently renamed in his honour. Some time later, after thwarting an attempted subjugation of her adopted planet by chilloks - highly developed, diminutive creatures evolved from ants – my grandmother returned to Earth. And polkingbeal67 became the new leader of Smolin9. That all makes perfect sense, right? You’re following me okay?

Yukawa3, who had accompanied us on the wormhole trip, was a native of this new temporary home planet of ours and a seasoned veteran of wormhole travel. He had assumed his native Mortian form, but it didn’t alarm me – I’d seen him this way before. Mortians are small naked humanoids, no more than five feet tall, with disproportionately large heads, hands and feet. Oily, luminous, almost translucent skin covers their light, spindly frames and wide, lustrous oily-black eyes with greyish pupils dominate the exaggerated facial contours. They have no visible ears and sometimes their mouths keep opening and closing as if they’re gasping for breath. Think H.G. Wells and the Morlocks and then multiply it by a comically gruesome factor of quite a lot. He handed us each a vial of water. Except that it wasn’t water. It clearly wasn’t water because it smelt like a burning tyre filled with rotten eggs.

Aysha pushed it away. “No thanks,” she said. “What I need is some chicken soup.”

“Drink it!” he insisted. “It’s HDA. I hope that answers your question. You have to take it.”

HDA. Oh, yes, now I remembered. We had ingested some of this foul-tasting liquid before we had set out from Earth. HDA stood for Homeodynamic Disruption Antidote and it tasted like, well, burning rubber and rotten eggs.

“You like it?” asked yukawa3.

“Er, yeah,” I said, almost gagging. “In theory.”

“By the way,” he said, “you’ll be pleased and honoured and humbled to know that the planet has had another change of name and it now goes by the name of your grandmother.”

I don’t think I could have been more astonished if he’d mutated into a hippopotamus and started dancing the flamenco. “This planet is called ‘Mrs Hill’?”

“Melinda. It’s called Melinda in honour of your grandmother.”

I suppose I should have felt pleased and honoured and humbled, but I was too bewildered and confused and preoccupied with my wormhole travel sickness. “Why? Why have you changed it? Why my grandmother? Why does this planet keep changing its name?”

Looking around, I noticed we were standing in a large magma chamber, illuminated by clusters of reddish orbs. Nearby, a pale, slimy, elongated face peered studiously at a kind of control panel, misshapen fingers twitching feverishly over a bank of screens displaying rapidly scrolling hieroglyphics. Yukawa3 introduced the stranger as casimir2 but offered no further elucidation. Unfailingly polite, I offered my hand. The first thing I noticed was the firm handshake. The second thing I noticed was the thin odorous fluid secreting from rubbery protuberances on his fingers. As I made a mental note to try noticing things in a different order in future, Aysha and I just stared, entranced.

Aysha whispered to me. “Do you suppose they ’ave any idea how ugly their children are gonna be?”

The two Mortians hesitated for a moment and then conferred together in their native tongue. Like a runaway train gathering speed, the conversation soon became animated and yukawa3′s expression distorted into confusion and then into horror.

“Everything okay?” I asked tentatively. The question landed like a glass of water on an oil fire. Their voices became even more agitated.

Unimpressed, Aysha stiffened, folded her arms in protest and coughed loudly to catch their attention. To no avail. Judging by the way yukawa3 was flapping his arms around, like a fledgling bird desperately attempting a maiden flight, it would appear that casimir2 was delivering some unwelcome news.

Aysha muttered something about the planet clearly lacking the capacity to sustain intelligent life as we knew it. I could see what she meant. Clearly, nothing was going to calm or distract yukawa3 or casimir2 for the time being.

If we had been expecting some sort of ceremony to mark our arrival, those expectations were disappearing like worms in a piranha tank. So, no twenty-one-gun salute, nobody in silk vestments, no formal introductions, no lavish buffet and no flash photography. No ticker tape or baskets of fruit from the local Mortian village. No local dignitaries and their families agog with excitement. Nothing. Surely it wouldn’t have hurt to put up a few streamers? It didn’t feel like we were the first man and woman to boldly go where no man or woman had ever been before.

I took Aysha’s arm and we walked unsteadily towards an oval-shaped doorway in the magma surround. It struck me that the surface gravity was remarkably similar to that of Earth. “What do you think’s going on?” I asked her.

“Search me,” she said. “Hey, though... What about that? We’ve just been in a worm’ole! We’re on another flamin’ planet! Hey, I’m an astronaut! I can’t believe it! And look at me, I’m wearin’ jeans, for crissakes!”

“Yes, I know.” I bit my lip in a mixture of pleasure and pain, anxiety and delight, a cloud of doubt scudding across my mind like one of those clouds that are thick underneath and fluffy on top like a wedding cake or something. “Just so long as we can get back again!” Suddenly, I was really missing even the worst aspects of life on Earth. Joni Mitchell was right - you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. “Aysha, tell me, seriously, are you as terrified as I am?”

“Pull yourself togevver, Neil, dammit!” she admonished me.

She was right. I quickly pondered the ramifications of space travel and concluded that the physical aspect of it is only half the challenge. About eighty percent of it is mental. Let’s face it, this was an opportunity to demonstrate man’s indomitable spirit in the face of crushing adversity. And I didn’t like the notion of getting crushed by adversity, or anything else, so I steeled myself indomitably for the challenges that lay ahead. “Don’t worry, I’m up for this,” I assured her. “After all, my grandmother was an intergalactic traveller. I’ve got space in my blood.”

“You’ve also got it between yer ears!” said Aysha scornfully. “Jus’ cos your face looks serious, don’t mean yer bein’ sensible. Hey, this place is a bit underwhelming, isn’t it?”

I looked around. She was right. It needed a lick of paint. And a carpet. A few throw pillows wouldn’t have gone amiss either.

“Were we supposed to bring our own chairs?” said Aysha. And then her voice tailed off. Eyebrows arched in surprise, she was peering intently at something over my shoulder. “O-k-a-y,” she intoned slowly, as if she was trying out the word for the first time. “That’s w-e-i-r-d.”

“What’s weird?” I asked, spinning around towards the rough-hewn opening in the wall. I smiled brightly - I’ve no idea why, but I suppose it could have been the HDA kicking in. Quite honestly, the sight that met my eyes did not warrant a smile at all. No more than ten yards away, two apparently human earthling forms were crouching in the shadows, pointing strange twin-barrelled alien firearms at us. So, yes, that was weird.

Well, here was my first serious brush with adversity. A courageous person would have reacted in a calm and appropriate manner. A courageous person would have managed to stifle the involuntary shriek that issued from the bottom of my soul before I clutched Aysha’s sleeve in abject terror. Well, you know what? I don’t care. Personally, I think courage is overrated. If we hadn’t wasted so many centuries worshipping gods, sports, alcohol and courage, we could perhaps have developed some really useful stuff like invisibility cloaks and shape-shifting. And, at that moment, I’m sure Aysha was fully on board with those sentiments. Possibly. I don’t know. What I knew was that the novelty of all this was starting to wear off.

The two armed men rushed straight past us like we weren’t even there. One of them fired some kind of laser beam at the wall above yukawa3’s head, causing the magma to sputter languidly for a few seconds before it subsided like a pricked balloon. As casimir2 raised his hands in a gesture of peevish surrender, yukawa3 dropped to the floor like a pancake missing the pan. After a few seconds, he opened one eye tentatively to peer at the source of the shooting and then promptly shut it tight again.

“Get up!” barked one of the men, a tall swarthy individual with a callous expression in his eyes. He aimed a kick at yukawa3’s torso, which the latter evaded by adroitly flexing his back. A second kick landed with a sickening thud, but, curiously, the Mortian didn’t flinch and exhibited no sign of pain whatsoever.

Aiming his weapon at the desk, the other man, shorter and chunkier, motioned for casimir2 to move away. Another blast of laser vaporised some dials and instruments on the control panel. “Move this way! Both of you!” he ordered, indicating the oval doorway.

Aysha was the first to recover her composure. “What’s ‘appenin’? Tell me!” she demanded. “Who are you? What’s goin’ on?”

The taller man waited for a few seconds while his accomplice ushered the two Mortians through the doorway. “We don’t want any trouble out of you two,” he said, nodding towards us. “Just stay here out of the way until we get back.”

Before either of us could respond, all four of them were gone, leaving us alone, as startled and bewildered as a pair of blind people at a busy intersection.

Aysha turned to me with an expression of sheer disbelief. “What the ’ell?” she cried. “Who are they? The ones wiv the guns. They’re like us, right? From Earth?”

“Uh, well yes, kind of,” I agreed. “Humans. From Earth. Just like you and me.” I explained that when my grandmother had first arrived on the planet, the Mortian leader had assumed she would miss the society of her own species, so he had arranged for the abduction of a dozen young adults from various prisons near her home back on Earth (he had figured that their incarceration had rendered them expendable). So, anyway, unless there had been more recent abductees, the two guys with the laser weapons were presumably descended from those prisoners.

“Well, I’m so reportin’ them!” Aysha managed to force a smile.

One thing was clear. Not only was there going to be no welcome reception for us, but apparently, there was not even going to be any coffee. Nothing. No coffee. Just some kind of crazy ambush. No streamers and no coffee. Also… and my brain was trying to avoid processing this… but when that laser beam had demolished the instruments on casimir2’s desk, did that put paid to our prospects of ever…? No! No, surely not. Perish the thought!

I needed a coffee.

Like most people, I guess, I like to swim in the mysteries of life until I’m completely soaked. Then I like to dry off in the warm glow of something perfectly banal, comforting and obvious. If you hang around in the mysteries for too long, you can get all pruned and wrinkly.

Oh god, I needed a coffee.