Terradox Reborn

by Craig A. Falconer

  “I’m not looking for Holly’s approval, if that’s what you’re writing,” Viola said.

  “Don’t worry about what I’m writing,” Jillian replied in a gentle tone. “I’ll destroy it as soon as we’re finished. That’s why I’m using my personal notebook and not logging any of this in the system.”

  “Okay, but as long as you know it’s not about that. I’ve read a lot of the old psychology books, especially the ones about childhood psychology, and I’ve read all of yours. But this isn’t me looking for approval from a mother figure or any of that stuff. I was 17 when Morrison’s thugs killed my mum because her research was getting too close to the truth about his part in engineering the famine, so it’s not like I grew up with just my dad and that I’m attaching some special thing to Holly.”

  Jillian nodded in understanding.

  “And it’s also not because everyone else treats me like some kind of hero and Holly is the only person who doesn’t,” Viola went on. “Well, I guess subconsciously it might partly be that, because everyone else is beyond nice to me and always interested in whatever I’m saying. You know… when the parents come to collect their kids, if I said ‘don’t you think the sky looks kind of green today?’, they’d hesitate for a second then squint and say ‘now that you mention it…’. There are maybe six people here who treat me like a normal person: you, Peter, Bo, my dad, Grav, and Holly. Some of the kids, too, but only because they’re so young.”

  “You’re doing most of my work for me here,” Jillian quipped, lightening the mood. “Should I leave?”

  Viola smiled but didn’t stop venting. “But then with Holly, the one person who makes the decisions, it’s like she pays less attention to what I say than what anyone else says. I feel like she still sees me as a kid. I know that probably doesn’t make sense to you — I’m 23, and I was even younger when she put my name forward to be in charge of raising the next generation of colonists — but if you’d been here when the seven of us crashed into this place six years ago, you’d understand. Protecting me and Bo was her total focus. It’s just like I still see Bo as someone I need to take care of and look out for, even though he’s the smartest person here and in charge of a whole team of people. You know, because I remember him being picked on at school, not having any friends, losing his breath when he walked up the stairs… all of it. And I think Holly still remembers me as that girl with blue dye in her hair, angry about everything and nothing at the same time, and with no ideas worth hearing. First impressions die hard, I guess.”

  “What do you think I see when I look at Chase?” Jillian countered. “The rest of the colony — and pretty much everyone on Earth, according to the viewing figures — they all see him… well, you know how they see him. The Terradox Live producers have built him up into some kind of flawless example of the ideal modern man. I’m as proud of him as any mother could be, but when I look at him I see more than you do. I see the shades of grey, but I also see how much he’s grown. And I can only imagine that Holly sees exactly the same when she looks at you. She doesn’t assume that everything you say is automatically worth hearing, but she definitely doesn’t give your views less consideration than everyone else’s. Let’s take your brother, Bo, for example. Do you think Holly would take Bo’s input on this issue more seriously than yours?”

  “A thousand per cent,” Viola answered immediately.

  “And why do you think that is? Bo was frail and weak when your Karrier crashed here all those years ago. The first time Holly saw him, he was curled up in a blanket. His growth was stunted by his condition and he couldn’t walk for more than a few hours. If Holly’s failure to take your views as seriously as you feel she should was related to the circumstances of your initial meeting, which is what you suggested a few minutes ago, why wouldn’t the same apply to Bo?”

  Viola thought in silence for a moment. “Maybe she wants to keep me in my lane. I mean, going by some of the theories in the old textbooks, if I was looking at this from the outside I could kind of understand if she saw me as an eventual threat to her position… you know, because I’m also one of the seven. Spaceman is dead, Rusev is on the station, and none of Bo, my dad or Grav have anything close to the people skills they’d need to keep a colony in check. I’m a lot younger, obviously, and Rusev loves me almost as much as she loves Holly. And then there’s the kids we’re raising here — the colonists of the future — who all look up to me because I’m with them every single day. But I don’t really think it’s like that, because neither of us are like that; I don’t want to take over running this place — definitely not anytime soon, anyway — and Holly isn’t that kind of power-driven person, either. Maybe it was just bad timing with the stress she was under ahead of the board meeting and how strongly I feel about these new restrictions, but we’ve never had an argument like that before. It was more like a fight than an argument. If Peter and Grav hadn’t been there, I don’t know where it would have gone. She wasn’t for backing down any more than I was, and we both said some things we probably wish we could unsay.”

  “Well you seem to be on top of your thoughts and feelings right now, and awareness is the main step to staying on top of them,” Jillian said. “You’re welcome to vent, but I don’t think there’s much else I can tell you.”

  “I think that’s it,” Viola said. “I didn’t mean to rant. It’s just that this thing she’s going to do with the wristbands… that’s not about me. People don’t understand it, but when they start getting electric shocks for walking too close to the wrong invisible line within zones they’re allowed inside, that’s going to be bad for the colony. But she won’t listen to my view and right now it’s like no one else is willing to question her.”

  Jillian closed her notebook for good and put it down at her side. “Speaking personally, and in no other capacity, if you want to talk about what’s good and bad for the colony…”

  “Go on,” Viola said.

  “Well, it’s critically important for the health of the colony that you two present a unified public position on all important matters. If you truly feel this strongly about the upcoming changes, you and Holly have to iron that out in private. And if she really won’t engage in a discussion with you, which I know she will, I’ll step in and tell her what I’m telling you now: divisions at the top become divisions all the way down, and we can’t allow that to happen. It would be the same if we made a policy change which fell within the scope of our departmental autonomy and Holly didn’t like it. If we refused to even discuss her concerns, and even if her disagreement wasn’t public, it would breed distrust and resentment. In any social framework, the combination of distrust and resentment is an insidious thing. But the combination of distrust and resentment between the highest-strata members of a closed community like this colony? Well, that doesn’t end well — for anyone.”

  Viola nodded. “Thanks for coming out to talk to me,” she said, ending the session by rising to her feet. “I feel better.”

  “My pleasure. And if I can give you one tip for the feeling you mentioned earlier, of every day being the same…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I looked at your basic file on my way here, and I saw that you’ve eaten vegetarian lasagne for the last four hundred and eleven nights in a row. Your self-serve dining machine has thousands of possible choices and hundreds of pre-set meals, and I strongly recommend that you try some more of them. Physically perceived difference is good, even though we both know it’s all made of algae.”

  “But what difference does it really make?” Viola asked. “Like you just said, it is all algae and I do know that. Don’t get me wrong: it’s delicious, and physically I’ve never felt better than I do when I’m living on this stuff. But that doesn’t mean I forget what it’s made of.”

  “Viola, your mind is more powerful than all of your physical senses combined. And the point I’d use to illustrate that is that you persistently order vegetarian lasagne from your dining machine’s selection menu, even though the
regular lasagne option is literally identical in every way. Rusev understood the power of perception when she designed the machines, which is why that vegetarian option exists; it gives you what you want, and it subconsciously makes others feel like they’ve chosen something more, well, meaty. Just try mixing things up now and again. That’s all I’m suggesting.”

  “You make too much sense,” Viola said, with no comeback to the logic of Jillian’s words. “But it is pretty damn creepy that you know exactly what I eat and when. I don’t think you should tell other people that you have that kind of data.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t,” Jillian said. She then paused to grin at a joke she hadn’t shared yet: “See… there you are getting special treatment, even from me.”

  Viola grinned, too.

  “But our data really is no more invasive than it has to be. I made sure of that when they consulted me about this kind of thing in the early days, because it’s bad for the psyche when people feel like they have no privacy. For example, I can see a variable like how many hours you and Peter spend at home together, but not how long you spend in the same room, or awake together in the same bed, or…”

  “I think that’s enough for one session,” Viola laughed, slightly uneasily. “Do you want to share a capsule back to Sunshine Springs?”

  Jillian shook her head. “I’m going to set up some things for tomorrow morning while I’m here, so I don’t have to come in early to do it then. Until then, bear in mind my primary suggestion that you and Holly really need to sit down and talk when she gets back. Mainly about your views on these upcoming changes to intra-zonal security, but also more generally about your ability to have your voice heard. Just know that she cares about you — a lot. More than you know.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” Viola said with a smile. “Thanks again for coming back to hear me out.”

  “Anytime. Have a good night.”

  Viola stepped outside and into one of the vacant transport capsules on the other side of the Childhood Development division’s main entrance gate, where the letters CDD were etched in enormous Art Deco lettering. She placed a finger on the capsule’s touch panel and was greeted by a warm robotic voice.

  “Good evening, Viola. Would you like to go home?”

  Viola glanced down at her wristband and tapped a few options to see whether Peter was home yet.

  “Yeah,” she said, smiling at the good news that he was. “Take me home.”

  The spherical capsule then lifted off to a safe height of fifteen metres and began its short trip to Sunshine Springs, the colony’s main residential zone which Viola and almost everyone else called home.

  Only three minutes later, Viola’s wristband flashed and chimed to indicate an incoming call from Peter.

  When she tapped the option to pick up, his voice was automatically relayed through the transport capsule’s immersive speakers. Although his voice was far less accented than that of Grav, his Serbian-born mentor, Peter’s nevertheless retained more than a hint of his Kazakh background. “Hey,” he said. “I saw that you’re on the way home. Do you want me to get some dinner ready?”

  “Yeah,” Viola replied. “Thanks.”

  “Okay, see you soon.”

  “Peter, wait… I didn’t tell you what I want.”

  He laughed slowly. “Hmm, let me think. Uh, it wouldn’t happen to be vegetarian lasagne, would it?”

  “What are you having?”

  “I feel like some hot dogs.”

  “Okay, I’ll have the same,” Viola said.

  Peter couldn’t hide his surprise. “Really?”

  “Well, the vegetarian hot dogs.”

  “It’s all algae, V,” he laughed again. “But no problem, I’m on it. So what’s the occasion for ditching the usual order?”

  “Nothing special,” Viola said. “I just feel like it’s time to start mixing some things up around here.”

  five

  As Chase Jackson climbed out of his bed inside the Isolation Kompound at the heart of Little Venus, he stretched his arms and made his way to the calendar on his bedroom wall. Once there he happily crossed off yet another day, with no idea that hundreds of millions of people would soon see footage of him doing so.

  Chase had begun this daily ritual when his group’s relatively comfortable isolation test entered its final month, and the producers of Terradox Live had quickly taken to showing it every day. One buzzword-focused engagement analyst at Terradox Studios pitched Chase’s habit as “an organic opportunity to remind viewers of how little time is left without the need for intrusive voiceovers or text overlays”, and head honcho Monica Pierce had agreed wholeheartedly.

  Only seven days now remained until Chase and his fellow prospective astronauts would emerge from their self-contained habitat to reunite with their friends and families in more hospitable areas of Terradox. The only people sorry about that were the production staff responsible for Terradox Live, who had recently been filling between 50 and 55 minutes of their hour-long flagship show with footage from inside the Little Venus test site.

  Viewers wouldn’t accept a return to the low-key and drama-free magazine show which had preceded the beginning of the isolation test — historic viewing figures didn’t lie — and frantic brainstorming meetings were a constant activity for production staff as they attempted to prevent an overnight collapse in viewership which would have a direct and unpalatable effect on their performance-related pay.

  The most popular idea so far was a pitch to follow the stories of Chase and his five colleagues once they returned to the relative normality of colonial life, but Monica was far less confident than her Earth-based network paymasters that any of the test subjects — utterly oblivious to their fame — would willingly engage in any further media work. She tried to explain that the test’s participants, men and women of science who had signed up for a legitimate training experiment, had nothing in common with the desperate reality TV stars of the past who would have gladly jumped at the chance to extend their fifteen minutes of fame via any available means.

  There was also the issue of whether Holly would allow Monica and her cameras to get anywhere near the astronauts-in-training once the test was complete, and this was just one more point on which Monica considered her bosses to be baselessly optimistic.

  But for Chase Jackson, optimism and positivity were the words of the moment. He and five others had endured 358 long days inside a small modular habitat in Terradox’s inhospitable Little Venus zone, with no option to bail out and no means of two-way contact with the rest of the colony.

  The Kompound itself had been tested by way of exposure to conditions more extreme than anything it could have faced on Earth, but the primary subjects had undoubtedly been the six individuals chosen to participate. All six had so far dealt admirably enough with their collective isolation and three in particular had already decisively justified their selection from a shortlist of several dozen qualified applicants. Whether the first real mission any of them would undertake would actually involve Venus was a topic of occasionally fierce debate among high-ranking individuals on both Terradox and the Venus station, but Chase and his colleagues were as oblivious to such matters as they were to the level of attention they would encounter upon their imminent exit from the Kompound.

  Holly and Rusev, among other prominent individuals, had high hopes for using Terradox as a jumping-off point for all manner of research vessels and ultimately for manned missions to previously unexplored celestial bodies.

  The show’s near-incessant focus on Chase, a natural leader who Holly saw as a future stalwart of such missions once Terradox’s space port was up and running, caused her some alarm in this regard. Because although all researchers who called Terradox home would receive significant financial remuneration on their eventual returns to Earth should they ever grow restless of their all-expenses-paid stints on the high-tech, low-stress and cash-free colony, there was little doubt that Chase would soon be offered astronomical sums of money to
return to Earth sooner rather than later for lucrative media and entertainment work.

  Everyone who completed a research placement or filled any other employment position on Terradox would return to Earth far wealthier than they left, but the remuneration was significant rather than enormous given that everything during their stay was fully paid for, including their homes, food, healthcare, education and community amenities. Nothing was rationed and no one went without, with systems in place to ensure that potentially distracting monetary concerns were not an issue. Carefully considered incentives had been designed to encourage and reward exceptional work and effort without breeding resentment, but all homes and facilities on Terradox were so comfortable that some hardworking individuals had politely declined offers to move themselves and their families into larger accommodation when their achievements merited the offer.

  For the researchers on Terradox, it wasn’t and never had been about the money. With this in mind, Holly hoped that the passion which initially drove Chase’s desire to become an astronaut would win out over the blank cheques that were sure to come his way. The fact that his parents were firmly committed to their critical roles at the Botanical Gardens and the Childhood Development division gave Holly reason to be optimistic that they could talk him into staying should his head be turned, but it more importantly reassured her that they wouldn’t follow their son back to Earth should the worst come to the worst.

  Simultaneously losing both the Head of Botany and the CDD’s all-important psychologist would have been a difficult double-blow for the colony to absorb without major interruption, so it was a source of great relief that at least two of the Jacksons were in it for the long haul.

  “Morning,” Chase said, greeting two of his colleagues as he joined them for breakfast.

  “Nice of you to join us, Chief,” Marcel Platt replied, making a point of exaggeratedly checking the time on his wristband.