Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  Viola began her efficient morning routine with a spring in her step, glad of the previous evening’s chat with Jillian Jackson and feeling a new sense of perspective. She had also talked through it all with Peter before bed, and his reaction to her comment that she hadn’t been feeling fully at home on Terradox was simple:

  “It’s easy to take this place for granted, V. But if you slow down and take notice of the small things, you’ll see how lucky we are.”

  It was certainly true that Viola and almost everyone else had come to take a great number of everyday technologies for granted, including some which would have seemed incredible just a decade earlier. There was the self-serve dining machine in every home’s kitchen, for starters, which flavoured and shaped nutritionally fortified algae into remarkably convincing meals on demand.

  Having grown up thinking Rusev was crazy to think that algae could feed the world and believing that it was unfit for human consumption — both erroneous beliefs owing to incessant Global Union propaganda — Viola had since grown happily and healthily accustomed to eating nothing else throughout her several years on the Venus station.

  The two new developments in this regard were a highly convenient pipeline delivery system and a highly beneficial ‘nutritional personalisation’ upgrade.

  On the station, the algae had always been grown in the same huge communal multi-tank machines from which it was delivered.

  On Terradox, however, the hard work was now done remotely in the colony’s vast agricultural zone and the algae was piped underground before ultimately arriving in each family’s kitchen via an appliance no larger than an electric kettle, which most colonists referred to simply as their dining machine.

  Each dining machine was linked to its family’s up-to-date medical records, which enabled the system to make minor changes to the algae’s micro- and macro-nutritional profile prior to delivery in order to address suboptimal biological balances caused by anything from natural hormone cycles to recent changes in activity levels or sleep patterns. This flexibility ensured that everyone got exactly what they needed, with no discernible effect on flavour or texture. A ‘Guest Mode’ feature allowed users to order nutritionally personalised meals for any friends they were entertaining, with each machine’s fingerprint sensor requiring confirmation that the guest was present.

  Viola’s dining machine recognised her finger as she placed a relatively adventurous breakfast order of avocado on toast, following Jillian’s advice to try different things rather than sticking with her tried and trusted choices.

  Within thirty seconds, an appropriate quantity of fortified algae had been nutritionally adapted to meet Viola’s body’s precise needs, piped into her home, shaped and flavoured by her machine, and placed on her plate. Like every other order, this one had to be seen, smelled and tasted to be believed — truly, ‘indistinguishable’ was far more than a marketer’s buzzword.

  Viola filled the thirty-second wait by ordering a drink from a less complex machine on the other side of her sink. The process by which her orange and pineapple juice was delivered was simpler than that which delivered her food — all this took was traditionally plumbed water and a few thickeners, colourings and flavourings — but the results were no less excellent. At night she tended to order from the drinks machine’s cocktail selection, with mimosas being a favourite pick. But having left Earth at seventeen and having spent the intervening six years on the Venus station and Terradox, real alcohol had never touched Viola’s lips.

  With her breakfast and her drink in hand — both of which had been provided completely free of charge, like everything else on Terradox was for all colonists and not just those as high-ranking as her — Viola walked outside to her wide porch and looked out at the picturesque community of Sunshine Springs. Almost every colonist lived somewhere in this huge residential zone, which had been carefully designed to ensure that it looked and felt more spacious than it was.

  Only a handful of individuals lived elsewhere, including Viola’s father Robert who was permanently stationed at the Habitat Management division’s headquarters in the eerie zone of New Eden, a zone no one else liked to talk about and which Roger Morrison had chosen as the site of his own plantation-style home away from home for use while he and his chosen few had intended to shelter as Earth was effectively fumigated to eliminate the masses. Morrison’s home and the other buildings which once stood in New Eden were demolished during the colony’s development, razing to the ground the horrors they represented from not only Morrison’s abortive ‘Great Reset’ plans but also from the hostage-taking coup of his disciple David Boyce.

  But there was too much joy and wonder on Terradox to dwell on such things, and Viola’s mind focused accordingly on a passing pair of brightly coloured butterflies.

  The scent of real lavender filled the air, carried in the breeze from the plants lining the path to her home’s front door. This couldn’t help but remind Viola of the Venus station’s artificially scented main entrance dock, which had once seemed like the most welcoming place known to man.

  That, however, had been before the Terradox colony and before Sunshine Springs.

  That had been before she laid eyes on the artfully laid-out streets lined with bountiful blossoming trees and with considerable green space between each pastel-coloured home, with concrete kept to a minimum as the efficiency of Terradox’s multi-lane and multi-level capsule-based transport system left no need for private vehicles and hence no need for driveways or roads. Jillian Jackson and the colony’s other psychologists had agreed with the social planners that it was undoubtedly worth devoting significant space to residential developments, since surroundings like Sunshine Springs were measurably better for the human psyche than life in a high tower or concrete jungle.

  As the end result of much careful planning, Sunshine Springs’ single-storey homes and the gardens which surrounded them gave off something of a retro vibe which had apparently been inspired by mid-twentieth century American design standards that Viola didn’t know a lot about. All she knew was that Sunshine Springs and the wider Terradox colony was a great place to be, and as she watched neighbouring children running around on the grass ahead of their school-day she would oversee in the CDD, she knew that Peter was right: she really did have an awful lot to be grateful for.

  But rather than any specific technologies or perks, Viola reflected that the thing she had been taking for granted most of all was perhaps her ‘job for life’ in a colony for which there was an eager and extensive waiting list of millions on Earth. Others would have done anything to be there — to experience what she woke up to daily — and she tried to keep this in mind.

  Over a pleasant outdoor breakfast, she followed Peter’s suggestion of writing down her specific objections to the issue which had been troubling her most in recent days: Holly’s determined insistence upon introducing intra-zonal restrictions on colonists’ movements. Peter suggested this largely so that Viola could think through her objections and hopefully realise that they were founded more in emotion than rationality, as he saw no real problem with the imminent changes and actually believed they would make his job of keeping Terradox safe easier than it was already.

  In previous discussions with Peter, Viola had argued that she knew more about the average colonist’s life and feelings than he did by virtue of her daily interaction with hundreds of children and parents. Peter retorted that Jillian, a psychologist with access to far more data about colonists’ feelings than either of them, saw the changes as nothing to be concerned about.

  For Viola, though, clearing her head was only a secondary benefit of this writing process. The main benefit she saw was that a series of coherently arranged objections would be far more likely to get through to Holly than the kind of unfocused points she had raised so far. Her two primary points, each of which had a handful of offshoots, respectively related to the effect on the colony’s morale and the chance of a catastrophic malfunction. The first point was one she had considered e
xtensively, but the second felt equally important.

  It was certainly true that the Terradox colony was always one malfunction away from absolute disaster — after all, an artificial atmosphere maintained and contained by a two-layer romobot cloak was the only thing keeping thousands of people alive — but Viola didn’t see that as any reason to abandon vigilance against new hazards. She jotted down brief bullet-point scenarios in which the new restrictions could cause problems, chief among them the possibility of either a romosphere-wide system failure or a localised failure preventing emergency response personnel from accessing the site of a time-sensitive incident.

  A more personal point Viola intended to make in her final effort to change Holly’s mind was that proceeding with the planned changes could harm Holly’s well-earned legacy. A rough sketch of this point was phrased in simple if slightly insensitive terms: “Whatever happens, you will be adored in death. But if you go ahead with this, you will be resented in life.”

  Viola put her digital notepad down and gazed out at Sunshine Springs once again. The playing children had by now gone inside to get ready to leave for school, and she stood up to do the same. She knew what Peter would say about the final point she’d written down: that Holly cared a lot less about what any colonists thought of her than she did about those colonists’ safety. And whether Viola liked it or not, Holly saw increased restrictions as a necessary step in maintaining that safety.

  This fleeting thought of Peter brought another one to the front of Viola’s mind as she stepped inside: where was he?

  She glanced again at her wristband and saw that his transport capsule, which had previously been on course for Sunshine Springs and really should have been there by now, had in fact continued beyond it and was heading in the general direction of some distant research zones. Calling him was now a necessity, and all it took was a few taps on the wristband’s screen.

  “Hey,” Peter’s voice boomed through the tiny speakers. “Sorry, I meant to call. I’m not going to be home before you leave for work. I’m not going to be home again until tonight. I’m still taking care of this.”

  “Taking care of what?”

  Peter paused. “Nothing to worry about,” he said. “I had to deal with something pretty soon after we fell asleep last night and I didn’t want to wake you. But if you haven’t heard anything yet, you will soon, and the main thing to know is that Holly and Grav are coming home early. They’re actually well on their way, so I’d say we can expect them to arrive sometime tonight. Ugh… I’m going to have to go for now; I have another call coming in from the Primosphere. I’ll see you tonight, though, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Viola said, happy to hear that Holly would be back so soon — all the more time to state her case against the restrictions — and equally happy to take Peter at his word that nothing too major was going on. “But speaking of the Primosphere, do you know any more than I do about the ‘Nancy’ project my dad mentioned a while back? I know Nisha’s dad is working on it, but he looked really freaked out when I asked about it yesterday.”

  Peter audibly blew air from his lips. “I’ll ask. But seriously, V, you need to be careful what you say. When you know about things you’re not supposed to, you can’t tell people. Have you mentioned Nancy to anyone else?”

  “Of course not. I just thought, you know, he’s high-level. He’s Nisha’s dad. It’s not like I asked some random researcher about it.”

  “I guess,” Peter said, having dismissed his incoming call for the moment. “And speaking of the Kohlis, say hi to the kid for me. Vijay, right? Tell him that I want him to work in security when he’s big enough and that in the meantime I need him to prove his strength by fighting the other kids and winning.”

  “Take your call,” Viola laughed. “I’ll see you tonight.”

  Back inside, Viola glanced at the TV wall and said the word ‘weather’ while holding a finger against her wristband. A life-size projection of a cheery weatherman then appeared as though he was really there, and he began a quick rundown of the day’s weather.

  Rundown was the appropriate word, since this was no weather forecast of the kind Viola remembered from her childhood on Earth. This weatherman wasn’t predicting what the day would bring, he was announcing it; his comments about the timing of an evening shower over Sunshine Springs were no more speculative than if he had said the next day would be Wednesday with Thursday expected to follow close behind.

  Keeping the weather seasonal and variable rather than having a set daily or weekly pattern was a very deliberate decision made during the colony’s planning stages, since it was deemed a useful way of helping colonists to forget that they were living in an artificial environment.

  Some of the colony’s primary social planners were the same people who had worked on the Venus station’s initial design decades earlier, but the sheer scale of Terradox presented new considerations. Everything from the size of colonists’ homes and the nature of their economic remuneration had been very carefully considered, with Viola retroactively privy to some of the issues discussed thanks to her closeness with one of the planners’ main psychological consultants in Jillian Jackson.

  Viola rejected the TV wall’s suggestion of turning to the news station — nothing bored her like the news — and the next voice she heard was Chase Jackson’s as she changed the viewing feed to Terradox Live AM, the early morning catch-up show which aired to a large pre-work audience on both Terradox and Earth and provided water-cooler talk for the rest of the day.

  As she stepped into the bathroom to finalise her preparations for the day ahead, Viola wasn’t paying enough attention to the voice which began speaking over Chase to realise that it didn’t belong to Monica Pierce. Monica’s absence would have been no bad news to Viola, whose dislike for her had begun when she caught her pointing cameras in children’s faces and asking them loaded questions during a filming visit to the CDD despite having been denied authorisation to ask them anything at all.

  Viola reported the incident to Holly, whose rebuke served only to rile Monica into airing thinly veiled barbs at Viola, ranging from comments about “rumours of nepotism” in her hiring over more professionally qualified applicants for her CDD role to a childishly catty and untrue report of a “lower than expected turnout” at her wedding to Peter, the first and only to have occurred on Terradox to date.

  The bathroom where Viola now stood, listening to Terradox Live AM through the open door, was one area of her home which contained some technology she didn’t like to think too much about.

  The colony’s planners had wrestled with the need to maintain up-to-date health records for all colonists in the least invasive way possible, and the decisions they ultimately made required an interpretation of the word ‘invasive’ which Viola considered interchangeable with ‘inconvenient’. She agreed that weekly or even daily doctor’s visits would have been unworkable, but that didn’t mean that she thought her smart toilet’s automatic testing mechanisms fell on the right side of the invasiveness line.

  A fingerprint sensor on the flush button ensured that all data was recorded in the appropriate digital file, and Viola’s — like every other female colonist’s — included one important data point more than Peter’s.

  In the colony’s eighteen months of existence so far, no one on Terradox had fallen pregnant. Another year remained until the first parenting window would open, but Viola and Peter hadn’t yet discussed their plans, or lack thereof. A year was a long time, and the most important thing was that they understood the stakes in the meantime: anyone who did fall pregnant would be asked to return home to Earth with no prospect of ever regaining their place in the colony. On Viola and Peter’s wedding day, Holly had taken the opportunity to remind the newly married couple that there really could be no exceptions to this rule, even for them, since the policy had been set in stone by the wider Rusentra board.

  In this regard, pregnancy was considered a disqualifying health condition rather than a disciplinary matter
; but given that no one had been pregnant when they arrived and that their status couldn’t change without someone else’s input, both partners would face the same consequence.

  When a social planner suggested what he considered an obvious safeguard in the form of temporary sterilisation, Ekaterina Rusev shot the idea down in no uncertain terms; because to her mind and many others’, memories of Roger Morrison’s eugenicist plot were far too fresh for any such moves to be encouraged. So strong was Rusev’s concern that applicants for the colony’s tremendously limited research placements might undergo an elective sterilisation procedure to improve their chances of being selected, she announced that anyone who did so after her first call for applications would be automatically discounted from consideration.

  Further medical tests were administered automatically each time a toilet’s flush button was pressed, with the only actively participatory test required of colonists being a finger-prick blood test on a small device next to the bathroom sink and directly in front of a set of electronic scales. The personalised nutritional profiling of the algae delivery system ensured that very few colonists ever veered too far from their ideal weight, and the permissible bounds were relatively generous.

  For each and every test, the acceptable results were identical to those required to travel to Terradox in the first instance. This meant that if a condition was detected which would have prevented an individual from joining the colony, and if that condition persisted, the individual would be required to leave.

  Because primary medical care on Terradox was of an excellent standard, very few instances of such persistent conditions had arisen; many minor ailments had been cured over the course of the colony’s first eighteen months via standard medical interventions, with the medical staff’s efforts greatly aided by the extensive system of automatic testing. Only two colonists had ever needed to venture to Earth for highly specialised treatments which the on-site medical staff weren’t equipped to provide, and one of those had already returned while the other was on course to be welcomed back soon.