In the land of the Jumblies

Marion had declined the Jumbly taxi at the Chankly Bore mattermitter station and opted to walk across the canton to the conference hotel. She wanted to savour her first experience of extra-terrestrial life and feel her feet walking on a different soil, smelling the oddly scented atmosphere of Lear through the ventilator
which adapted it for Earthlies’ consumption. She had only a week away, and would spend most of this in
the conference. 

Despite the diffusion of Earthlies through the galaxy in recent years with the development of the mattermitter interstellar travel network, most beings could not afford to pay the high insurance costs. Mattermitters enabled instantaneous transport but if accidents occurred anything transported through them might be rematerialised in unpredictable ways when coded to the receiver station. Not everyone survived. Compensation for those who did could bring lawyers fortunes of galactic proportions, after which there were long programmes of intervention. The high rate of accidents had stimulated a new area of clinical studies in which occupational therapists led, trying to resolve the occupational functioning of disassembled human parts which were recombined in unfortunate regenerations. Rearticulates, as they called themselves, were a growing and vocal presence at occupational science events. They regarded themselves as the forefront expression of universal neo-colonial capitalism, bodily beyond the frontiers of normativity. 

In the rapid expansion of exchange which had occurred between intelligent inhabitants of the planets, every world had re-articulate communities. Due to the unequal relations between the corporate planet EXX and its nearby twin Lear, Jumblies dominated the rearticulate demographic. Interstellar mattermitter exchange had been led by EXX businesses. The corporate benefits instant mattermitter travel offered galactic investors outweighed Jumbly voices for safer means. Rearticulation was ‘an acceptable risk’. Occupational therapists’ skills, along with other allied health professionals and their equivalents on many worlds, were amongst the assurances offered by the Universal Allied Health (a subsidiary of EXX mattermitter corporation) affordable brochure ‘Rearticulating Lives’. 

Lear was chosen for the First Occupational Science Extra-terrestrial conference, for its convenient position in the intergalactic mattermitter network and the particular spiritual philosophy of its population. Having a plastic anatomy which enabled them to survive traumas and bodily alterations, Jumblies believed essentially that ‘accidents will happen’. Jumbly cultures and technologies evolved from this principle; their everyday life was characterised by expressions and actions that many visitors to Lear found disturbing and unsettling. 

The Jumblies’ name for themselves as the first inhabitants of their planet roughly meant ‘accidents’. Interstellar relations brought many translation issues. Earthlies called the planet ‘Lear’ and its inhabitants ‘Jumblies’ because their green heads and blue hands, and their large ocean ships, built of fine wire and supported on the surface of one of Lear’s viscous seas by the remarkable surface tension of its fluids reminded them of a nonsense rhyme by an Earthly poet. All impressions stemmed from the Earthlies’ first encounter with an ingenious and light ship full of Jumblies, as impossible as a floating sieve. As the Jumblies said, through the scramblergoogle which had made intergalactic communication approximately intelligible, their ship floated because ‘accidents will happen’. Lear’s poem was mystifying to the Jumblies when read through the scramblergoogle, but it surely was an accident that the principal city of Lear was Chankly Bore, and that much Jumbly architecture resembled what the Earthlies called ‘crockery jars’.

The conference theme was to be ‘Meaning, purpose and occupation’. As first inhabitants of their planet Jumblies would not countenance ‘occupation’, being subject to the intergalactic corporation occupying their neighbour planet.  EXX monopolised all mattermitter travel and so determined and controlled Lear’s interplanetary access. Lear benefitted by becoming the off planet way station for EXX’s network, but the price, with more mattermitter stations than anywhere else in the galaxy, was that many Jumblies who
worked for EXX became rearticulates through frequent travel accidents. The plasticity of Jumbly anatomy fortunately enabled them to survive life-changing accidents which would be fatal to other beings.
Jumblies regarded rearticulation with some resentment but accepted these manifestations of universal randomness philosophically.

‘Doing and Accident’ became the compromise conference title. Marion’s presentation was on ‘Arbitrary doing, random being and the luck of becoming’, and she was already becoming more and more anxious about its reception, with every step. 

Marion tapped the side of her head once. She had been very apprehensive about the brain-computer surgery which had been offered as a sweetener with the mattermitter travel deal by the EXX corporation (‘protect yourself against the culture shock and information overload of the interstellar experience’). She still felt a little sore, but hoped to use her new USB socket without discomfort by the time of her conference presentation. The inserted drive flicked the hologram of her hotel into vision on her left so that she could compare with the buildings around her. She had not left the precinct of the mattermitter compound although she was now some minutes from the station. Jumblies, like many extra-terrestrial peoples, were wary of off-world inhabitants mingling too freely outside mattermitter compounds without proper supervision, and this caution was reciprocated back on Earth. Only the very rich could afford the checks and processes of clearance beyond the mattermitter station cantons, but of course it was necessary for many operatives to be established on each planet to keep embassies and the interstellar infrastructure running. Only in these places could different galactic cultures mingle freely. On Lear, the canton confines were more restrictively maintained than those on Earth due to the resentment of the influence of the EXX planet corporation on Lear’s affairs. 

A large crockery jar building sported the blue Novospace Hotel logo. Marion entered it with relief, unsettled already by the profusion of different beings in which Earthlies were a small minority, and the unfamiliar Jumbly environment. She had supposed that everywhere would look like Earth in a place like this but was confronted with reality: these facilities had been developed by an intergalactic conglomerate whose laws and regulatory procedures were literally alien. Of course, Lear would look nothing like Earth, why did she imagine that it might? The Novospace hotel interior, however, did at least have a recognisable desk at which stood a rearticulated Jumbly whose scramblergoogle said ‘Randomness!’. A green head nodded and a blue hand waved a keypass. ‘4th floor. 206. Use the lift or choose an accident’. One hand pointed to the lift and another to the mattermitter booth. ‘Whatever can go wrong!’ scramblegoogled Marion, politely. She chose the lift.

Shutting the door of 206 Marion flicked the nonsense button on her scramblergoogle and spoke into it. ‘Klara, are you here yet?’ hoping that the Jumbly technology had not managed to probe this cryptic feature of her particular model.