Project Terra

by S. J Woods

  “Teonie,” He said when he reached her. “I’m so sorry.”

  She looked small and tired, still dressed in her base-camp fatigues, her hair gathered at the back of her neck and her big, icy-blue eyes red-rimmed and hollow. She gave him a sad smile of thanks.

  “Are you going home now?” He asked when she didn’t say anything.

  Something changed in her demeanour at his question making her snap out of her sadness and to attention. “Did they mention that?”

  “You, me and Neha.” He said, confused at her reaction. The change in her had surprised him and he realised that the deep frown and pursed lips made her look more like Gia than he had noticed before.

  She inhaled deeply, biting her bottom lip. “Where’s Neha from?”

  “North Apatia, I think,” Dane shrugged. “Same place as Gia.”

  “Of course.” Teonie lifted her left arm, circling the nape of her neck with her fingers and rubbing the spot as if deep in thought. “Shall we go now?”

  “I think we have to wait,” Dane admitted. “Well, I do. They want to ask me questions about a few things Gia said.”

  Teonie’s apprehension changed to decisiveness and she took hold of his arm. “I need you to help me take some of her personal possessions back home. You’ll help me, right?”

  Dane sensed that there was something else she meant by this, but he agreed. “Of course.”

  “Meet me back at the hub when you’ve had your talk,” She said, turning and walking away from the hall. “I’ll be waiting.”

  SEVENTEEN

  It was evening by the time Dane and Teonie made their way to the Northern base to pick up a few of Gia’s personal possessions. Most of her belongings had been taken in as part of the investigation, but the Commanders had given permission for Teonie to take an image of Gia’s family and an opal ring that had been held in the base’s vault since she had joined up.

  Teonie waited patiently for the Vault Attendant to scan her and log the items, and the pair turned away making their way to the transportation bank. Teonie surprised him, suddenly branching left before they reached the pods and pushing past an Attendant to enter an elevator. Dane froze, wondering if Teonie was losing it as she tossed him the precious package carelessly, freeing up her hands. She had pulled something from her boot. The same small object she’d used to allow them to speak freely, and she held it close to the Attendant. The Artificial woman seemed to freeze mid-movement and Teonie swung her around, pushing her into the elevator with them.

  “Come on.” She hissed to Dane.

  “What the hell are you doing?” He followed her into the elevator, his heart pounding at the trouble they would be in.

  “Hold her up.” She said, jamming the doors to the elevator shut with a tap on a button. “I need to get to her control system. I can’t do it on my own.”

  Dane blindly obeyed her, wondering why even as he lifted the Artificial from the ground. He flinched at the surprising weight and Teonie dove straight in, ripping at the boots and peeling away a layer of prosthetic to pull a black box containing a metal chip free, replacing it with something that looked identical from her pocket.

  “What’s that?” Dane asked as the elevator descended through the building.

  “Her drive,” Teonie replied, her calm voice at odds with their predicament. “We’re heading to the tech room. I need to show you something.”

  “Tee,” He warned her. “We need to get out of here. We’re going to get in a lot of trouble.”

  “We’re already in a lot of trouble.” She told him. “I’m getting us out of it. Just hear me out please.”

  He hefted the Attendant back to her feet and Teonie clicked her device once more. The Artificial whirred into life.

  “Tech room please.” Teonie told her politely.

  The Attendant repeated her request, showing no signs of knowing that she’d been switched off.

  “How are you doing that?” Dane asked, staring at Teonie’s curled fist in awe.

  “It’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?” She crouched down in the confined space and made out like she was adjusting her boots, but Dane knew she was hiding the device. “I’ve been working on this for over a year.”

  “Have all the tech team got one?” Dane asked.

  Teonie laughed. “No, this is the only one. They’re working like idiots on a replica I left.”

  Dane inclined his head towards the Attendant in a silent gesture to Teonie to watch what she was saying.

  “She’s not a problem anymore.” She assured him. “I’ve overridden the Government controls so she only answers to me. She’s sending yesterday’s data back to the log, and she will do forever. Although they’ll notice after a day or two.”

  “You can do that?” He was starting to panic now at what he had unwittingly got himself involved in. Teonie was acting as crazy as Gia. Everything she was doing was illegal.

  “I would rather not do it,” She shrugged. “But they’ve pretty much sentenced me to death. The gloves are off now.”

  “Teonie.” Dane backed away slowly at her words. “Please tell me what’s going on? We’re going to get thrown into jail.”

  Teonie’s face softened at his words. “I just need you to trust me a little longer. I get that this is scary for you, but they were sending you back home. I couldn’t leave you.”

  The doors to the elevator drew open and Teonie stepped out into an empty corridor.

  “Come on,” She said to him earnestly. “I’m showing you. That’s why we’re here.”

  Dane looked around nervously, and in the absence of any military personnel, he decided it was safe enough to follow her. The corridor was lined with doors and Teonie moved her head from side to side as if trying to figure out which one she needed. She paused at one, using the side of her hand to knock the wall-mounted box from it’s post. She tugged at the box sharply, pulling wires from the wall and the door flew open. Dane couldn’t help but hold his breath, terrified that someone would be inside. He glanced at Teonie, feeling a jolt of horror at her tense face as she stared ahead of her, clearly with the same worry, but with her hand firmly at her hip hovering over her weapon.

  The room was empty and they both exhaled with relief. Dane had never seen the inside of a tech room before, and he looked around at the rows of huge screens, old-fashioned keyboards attached to some. Teonie jammed the wires back into the wall and lodged the door control back into place as best as she could.

  “Holly!” She called out to the vacant Attendant still hovering by the elevator. “If anyone comes tell them the General has commissioned privacy and they’re to leave. If the General comes, kill him.”

  Dane’s mouth dropped open at her words. “Teonie!”

  “I’m joking!” She laughed. “She wouldn’t be able to kill him. But she’d help us out if she was trying, right?”

  Dane’s nerves were on edge and he grabbed Teonie by the shoulders. “You seriously need to tell me what’s going on. This is dangerous. And illegal.”

  “I’m going to tell you everything from the start,” She said, wriggling free from his hold and tapping away at one of the screens. “What you decide to do is up to you.”

  He watched as her fingers flew over the keyboard and rows of numbers appeared, white against black. None of it meant anything to him and he felt a familiar sense of helplessness that all he could do was trust her.

  “I was asked to be part of a top-level classified project,” She finally started to speak as the sequence on screen flashed away and log-on page appeared. “Developing a system, basically an anti-tech forcefield. I thought it was crazy, but I did what I was told. I mean, why would anyone need that?

  We’re a small team, and I’m the most junior. It’s high-level, like the General and the Government high-level, but I was the one to make the breakthrough. It was made very clear that we weren’t to ask questions about what it was for. We just did what we were told. Sounds familiar, yeah?”

  Dane nodded, unsure o
f where she was going with this.

  “So, I was really curious about why and I started looking at some encrypted reports about Latheia, feeling like it was something to do with the rising tensions. I couldn’t see anything and, I don’t know what made me do it, I searched my surname in the encrypted top-level documents. It was just silly, like searching for yourself in the public spaces online, I guess. Nothing major, just listing me as part of this project and as a candidate for this operation. This was before we got called up, and I was over-the-moon. I saw Gia was on the list, and I was happy because she’s my cousin and she’s on another base, and I thought it would be cool if we were working together. I searched her name, and another document came up, but it was encrypted like I had never seen. I figured out how to remove the layers and I found something called Project: Terra. I thought maybe it was the code name for this operation, and I was gutted, thinking I’d not made it to the final cut. I didn’t have time to read it then and there, as I was meant to be working on the anti-tech project and I was worried someone would come in and see me.

  I spoke to Gia that weekend. We meet up occasionally and I mentioned it to her, swearing her to secrecy. She was intrigued, but she was also insistent that she wouldn’t have got into a special force over me. I argued that she was ground force, maybe they didn’t need much tech support, but she convinced me to look again. She was with me when I hacked it. I swear I wouldn’t have mentioned it to her otherwise, but she saw it. It was a list of all the Apatians who had been given Prototype Hybrids. I didn’t know what that was, but I do now. It’s a child that has had part of its genetic make-up altered and then, at birth they’re fitted with basically the same chips as Artificials. Every parent listed was, at one-point, Military Personnel. There were fifty-three couples listed. Cam and Alyssa Alexander were one of those couples.

  I didn’t know about Gia’s brother. I wasn’t even born when Gia’s parents had him. Gia was obviously just a young child herself. She remembered it all though. She broke down when she told me. She told me about how they took him away. They had a replacement, Josiah, a couple of years later. She tried to speak to her mother about it, when she was older, about these memories she kept having, and her mother denied he existed, but Gia knew he did. She could remember, vividly, how she used to rock his cradle and the heartbreak she felt on the day they took him away. She wasn’t quite four years old.

  She had nightmares about it, about being taken away. Still! Even as an adult, because her own parents denied it had happened. She thought she was crazy. I’ve never seen anyone cry like she did that day we read the list.”

  Dane felt a wave of nausea rise inside him and he fought to breathe as he processed her words.

  “They did this on purpose?” He gasped, shocked to the core. “With people’s babies?”

  Teonie turned to look at him and she paled at the pain she was causing him. She reached out and took his hand, squeezing it tightly.

  “Dane,” She said, her own eyes filling with tears of empathy. “I’m so sorry that I’ve got to tell you this.”

  Dane pulled away, feeling sick. Blood was pounding in his ears. What did this mean to him and his family?

  “There were fifty-three,” He said hollowly. “Fifty-two others like Arielle?”

  Teonie nodded her head and Dane could see she was as distressed as him at this thought.

  “I regret telling Gia,” She said, tears shining in her eyes. “She told me that the not-knowing made her feel crazy, but afterwards… Well, I think the knowing drove her crazy. She was angry at everyone; her parents for letting it happen, the Government, the Military, Latheia for causing the infertility in the first place…”

  “What else?” Dane asked suddenly. “What else did you find out?”

  He needed to know everything even though it was tearing at his heart to think that somebody had purposely done this to Arielle. And to his mother.

  Teonie took a deep breath and turned back to the screen, tapping in some more information until rows of tightly-packed text appeared on the screen. She clicked a few more keys and another screen sprang to life.

  “The project was part of a citizen-replacement plan. Apatia was planning on replacing fifty percent of their civilians with these hybrids. They used ex-military parents as they had their data, DNA, the lot on file and, most worrying, they supply all their nutritional supplements.

  Dane, your parents, Gia’s parents, all those parents have been plied with medication to keep them dazed and accepting that their children were taken away from them. The medication is still running now.”

  “Surely other people, friends, neighbours, families would say something?” Dane questioned, feeling dazed.

  “I thought the same,” Teonie turned back to look at him. “There’s hardly anything to show how they managed that. The project was pulled fifteen years ago, and it only lasted five years before people started noticing that the children seemed more like Artificials than…”

  She broke off not wanting to upset Dane further. “I did some research on the parents. There’s nothing set in stone, but from what I’ve uncovered they’ve purposely picked people who had little extended family, kept themselves to themselves. I can’t find anything that ties any of these people to each other.”

  Dane winced at the clinical deliberation, but nothing prepared him for Teonie’s next words.

  “All these parents, these ex-soldiers, are aged between fifty-five and forty-eight. Think about that.” She paused as if allowing Dane time to process her words. “Dane, over half of these people, one-hundred-and-six people, are dead now. Died of an array of natural causes.”

  The image of Dane’s father flashed through his mind and Dane thought he was going to throw up.

  “They did that?”

  “I’ve got no proof,” Teonie insisted. “No records. All I’ve got is the fact that it happened, and they shut down the project because it wasn’t working like they wanted it to.”

  “What else?” Dane asked, suddenly realising Teonie had called him here for a reason. Gia had disappeared for a reason.

  Teonie beckoned him forward. “Just look at that. I need you to see it.”

  Dane moved towards the screen, squinting at the words. A highlighted list of names. Missing.

  “What does that mean?” He asked.

  “Some of these people, the ones who are still alive,” She said, starting to shut down the screens methodically. “They stopped taking the supplements. Twigged that they had turned them into zombies. There are pockets of people, mainly from the poorer areas of cities, who are talking about all these crazy Government cover ups. You won’t find it online, it’s completely censored. I checked it all out. The supplements were one of the things they talk about. Apparently, these people try to forage in the parks, live off nature. They say it changed their lives.”

  Teonie got to her feet and took Dane’s hands in hers. “Dane, there’s been uprisings. Some of these parents have been part of it. Why the hell don’t we see this online?”

  “Uprisings?” Dane shook his head. It felt all too much to take in. He felt a pang of heart-wrenching empathy for Gia’s tormented state. If only he had known what had been going on in her head.

  “They’ve disappeared,” Teonie told him. “The Government wanted these people silenced. I guess some of the deaths are accounted to that, but they have a list of missing people. They suspect they’re living wild, but some were traced out on the ocean. The trail goes dead twenty miles from De Sierto.”

  “De Sierto?” Dane pictured the independent tiny island on a map in his head. Just a tiny dot in the vast ocean. Hundreds of miles from anywhere except Apatia.

  Teonie nodded. “And they’ve tried to get submarines and aircraft out there, but they can’t touch it. The anti-tech forcefield that I told you about? That’s what De Sierto have! That tiny country has outsmarted our super-power! I’ve figured out how to make one; they figure it’ll take ten weeks top to work out how to break through it.”
<
br />   “So, what you’ve created…” Dane’s mouth fell open in disbelief.

  “What I’ve created,” Teonie said slowly. “They can never have. They were on to Gia. They knew she knew. I was biding my time, trying to figure out what to do, but it’s too late. They have a tech-out planned for South Apatia. Specifically, a one-hundred-mile area that you and I will be in. I’m making an educated guess that they want us dead.”

  Dane’s first thoughts flashed to his siblings and he felt his blood turn to ice with pure fear.

  “We’ve got three days,” She said. “We’re going home and we’re getting our families.”

  “They’ll kill us!” Dane said, the endless possibilities whirling through his mind. “They’ve got weapons, vehicles, tech, we’re all chipped like animals!”

  “They’re going to kill us.” Teonie said. “Dane, we’ve got to try.”

  EIGHTEEN

  If Dane had felt nervous on his last trip home, that was nothing compared to the tsunami of emotions and worries rushing over him as they made their way back to South Apatia. Teonie took the lead, letting Dane follow her cool, calm instructions as they passed through the Military base. He couldn’t help but feel that every camera was fixed upon them, watching their journey, maybe picking up on their conversation, their body language. He had never felt paranoia like it.

  When they were finally on a non-military capsule, heading towards their first stop, Teonie’s home town of Glenrise, Dane’s jittering nerves eased up enough for him to start thinking about the logistics of Teonie’s plan.

  “Nothing we say is being recorded?” Dane turned to her as he tried to get his head around the jargon she used while she had worked her tech-magic on their wrist devices.

  “Nothing.” She confirmed, confident in her abilities.