THE FLOATER

It's all a question of scale....

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When Bernard Astrokid saw the bigger picture his mind almost melted.

He'd been on the space pod for all of his life. He'd been born there, educated there (by a genius father who found sharing his IQ was the most difficult thing a man has to fail at doing) and introduced to sex there by a mother who, having lost the love of her life as a consequence of an accident with an ice cube in zero gravity, thought him old enough to learn the basics.

It's all right, son, I'm sterile, she had informed him.

Then, after a few wonderful years, that loving, caring, nymphomaniac mother had died and he was all alone in the pod.

He'd been prepared for it. Both parents had paved the way, he with his Pythagoras and time dilation and she with her kisses and cuddles and tremendous orgasms.

What they hadn't done, though, is introduce him to the true loneliness of life between the stars. It's all right to say it, son you'll have nobody to talk to, just the computer for company, and Shirley's not much of a conversationalist, and a very different thing to show exactly what that means in a day after day, week after week, month after month kind of way.

Bernard Astrokid was on the cusp of going mad (isolation can do that to a man) when he began to see the bigger picture.

He had dials to attend to, measurements to take (though he didn't have a clue why) and sparkling things in space to compare with each other when he saw, out of the corner of one eye, a black mote. It wasn't exactly inside the pod, nor was it outside the pod, but rather to all intents and purposes it was inside his head.

“What's that, computer?” he asked.

“I've got a name, you know,” grumbled the computer.

“All right. What's that, Shirley?” he asked again.

“What's what?

“That black thing, a bit like a dot drifting around in front of my eyes?”

“There's nothing there. Not that I can detect, and being attached to the most sophisticated instruments known to man I can detect absolutely everything!”

“But you can't detect that? My black dot? You can't see or touch or test it even though its drifting here and there and everywhere?”

“I've told you, Bernard. There are no black anythings anywhere near us. We are in the emptiest piece of space anywhere and we're likely to be in it until you're old and grey and ready to pop your clogs. And after I've disposed of your withered corpse we'll still be charging nowhere rather too quickly for my peace of mind in this vastly empty piece of space!”

“Then it must be inside my head,” concluded Bernard, and something in his consciousness exploded with a flash of brilliance his father might have been proud of.

“I've got a floater,” he informed Shirley.

“A what?” asked the computer.

“A floater. A piece of debris inside my eye. I've read about them! They're harmless and can be positively fascinating!”

“What? Floating?”

“Exactly, computer.”

“Shirley.”

“All right, Exactly Shirley.”

“I can neither see nor measure nor in any way detect your floater,” grumbled the computer. “Here. Hold your head still and let me have a good look.”

Bernard did as he was asked. He held his head totally motionless. He barely moved the width or breadth of an atom one way or another.

“Ah. I see it!” chortled the computer at last. “It's tiny. And by tiny I mean itsy bitsy tiny, the tiniest thing I have ever seen, smaller even than a speck of dust that sometimes irritates the s**t out of me when you're asleep and all I've got to do is stare at specks of dust!”

“And it's inside my eye!” shouted Bernard. “It's inside my eye and when it floats past the porthole it obscures everything in the vastness of space! It is my own floater and I love it! Now take me home!”

“I can't,” grumbled Shirley.

“You damned well can!”

“I'm under orders...”

“To discover the hugeness of the Universe. I know. My dad told me that much, for what it was worth. So take me home.”

“Mission incomplete?” sighed the computer.

“No. Mission very complete. I have the Universe, all of it, in my eye. And more. Much more. I reckon … yes, I know … there's another floater in there, rising and falling... Two Universes inside my head! Yippee!”

“Sodding humans,” groaned Shirley, and the pod screeched to a standstill.