Lucky or Unlucky? 13 Stories of Fate

by Michael Aaron

  We ran all five of Beauform’s printers all day, extracting 30 sheets perforated exactly to my specs. I sent my apprentices along with a team of labourers on the evening tram with the sheets, bidding them a reassuring adieu as they trundled off to the Snag where they would begin folding the modules of Agustin’s new home. All in a day’s work.

  I already had other designs forming in my mind before I’d returned to my workshop. I was in the zone now, thinking about shapes and folds. Agustin’s new trap, not yet assembled, was bustled off to the dimly acknowledged “completed” box at the back of my brain, though the problem of Agustin—or future Agustins—was not.

  My feet clanked on the patterned floor of the covered walkway from the tram station to the waste processing station where I hoped to find my friend Ruby. The plant’s pumps were roaring away, relegating the byproducts of my day’s work to enormous tanks that rarely got to see this much action. I clambered down the spiral staircase onto the plant floor and made for the light in the control room, not bothering to try to announce myself over the cacophony. Ruby looked bored until she spotted me, at which point she leapt out of her chair to throw herself at me with an overenthusiastic greeting.

  “Trevor!” she exclaimed, hugging me around the chest, her raven-haired head coming no higher than my chest. “Oh, thank God! This is going to take hours! Nooreen is staying with Pinky while he’s sick, and I didn’t bring a book—d’you wanna play cards? Sort the recycling? Did you bring a project with you? Can I help?”

  “Yah, sorry,” I extracted myself and sat on a wobbly chair nearby, stashing my satchel under the desk, “we had a big assembly to print out today.”

  “No kidding! I have over a million gallons of cryolite here thanks to you. Like I said—it’s gonna take forever to process. I assume you’re here to play with me to make up for it.” Ruby crossed her arms and narrowed her black eyes at me, mustering all the threat of a sleepy housecat. I put my hands up in mock defence, though I had to smile.

  “I actually wanted to talk to you about the cryolite. Can you spare a few of your busy moments to talk shop? Okay—cool. Uh, Roobs, if I pump out the cavity under the hydrofarms, can you find something else to do with the waste? I mean, can you leave it empty, rather than pumping the cryolite back in?”

  Ruby balked at me, then pushed her glasses back up between her eyes and adjusted her seating.

  “Trevor. What do you think I am going to do with 200,000 gallons of cryolite? Make an acid bath? Dispose of bodies? This stuff is technically a controlled substance.” She laughed nervously, “Is this for Warden Khan?” I shook my head, and she scowled. “I know oversight is light out here, but I’d have to report that. Or better still, say no. What could you possibly need a 30,000 cubic foot hole in the ground for?”

  “I was thinking—I was thinking we need to start building down. Underground. You know.”

  “It’s hot underground,” Ruby pointed out. “And you’d be running a pretty constant risk of hitting an aluminum chloride vein.”

  “It wouldn’t be for permanent residences.” I flushed.

  “Is this for a new trap?” I shook my head. “You want to build a hidey-hole.” Ruby sat up, surprised. She glanced at the monitors, then back at me. “In case someone escapes the Snag. But I thought nobody could escape the Snag. We’ve been here twelve years. Nobody has ever—”

  “I just think it would be smart,” I interrupted, standing abruptly. Ruby looked alarmed, and I realized I was more bothered than I’d thought. Sure, the Snag has stood for twelve solid years. But things were changing. I had been there, I had seen. The first inmates were in the early stages of mutation. Their genemods gave them incredible strength, great reflexes, eagle-eye sight—stuff that was invaluable to a soldier’s life. Their rogue mutations were unstable, freakish changes that often hurt or crippled the soldier. They needed to be contained, to keep everyone safe, but the violent outbursts were brief, manageable.

  But Agustin was something else. His mutations were all beneficial. They didn’t seem to hurt him. He just kept getting better. I don’t know if the genemod technology was changing or what, but I was starting to feel like the Snag was becoming less of a rehab centre and more of a remote dumping ground. Somewhere up there was a military brass tinkering with experimental gene sequencing technology, and leaving us holding the bag. I couldn’t help but think they’d decided an escape scenario wasn’t their problem. I couldn’t help but think we were on our own out here, and we’d only been lucky so far.

  “Trevor,” Ruby said quietly, “are you telling me you can’t keep them in anymore?”

  “Of course I can,” I sighed. “But part of keeping them in might mean being able to step out of the line of fire once in awhile, you know?” I smiled, trying to look confident. “It just might mean we need a hidey-hole.”

  Ruby looked at her monitors again, considering.

  “I could pipe the cryolite into Lake Daxiong,” she conceded. “But it would take ages for it to become homogenous with the rest of the lake. You wouldn’t be able to use it for construction anymore. Not for a good long while. Years. Decades, maybe.”

  “There are other lakes.”

  Ruby nodded. “30,000 cubic feet…that’s not very big. I assume you’d want the whole town in there. It would be snug.”

  “It wouldn’t be for long—”

  Ruby waved her hand at me to be quiet, annoyed. “You could get a permit, you know. Clearance.”

  “I’d like to start immediate—”

  “Trevor!” Ruby silenced me. “Is something coming? Why the hurry? Should I be worried?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, taking my satchel in hand. “I just want to be ready. I want to build a new trap.”

  “The hole is for hiding, right? Trevor?”

  I nodded. Ruby’s eyes went wide anyway. We started making plans right then.

  The ice groaned a lot lately. Maybe I was getting paranoid in my old age, or maybe the weight of the town was putting a lot of pressure on the glaciers, it was hard to know. It was Ruby’s job to know, and she didn’t seem worried. “Let them off-gas,” she’d say, “as long as nothing combusts, the gas can’t ignite.”

  Everything on Allie was built to work without combustion, though sparks were sometimes inevitable. We just did what we could to mitigate that risk. Transportation was the riskiest thing we engaged in. If you could walk somewhere, you did, all bundled against the subzero winds in your thermals. The trams were…well, the trams. Offworld flights all departed from close orbit, from a thinly-manned flight dock reachable by elevator. The elevator could only carry a few people at a time. It was hardly feasible mass transportation.

  I had been working on a glider design for some time now, and this seemed like a good time to start construction. We’d injected the pumps into my underground cavern and started to drain it, and the aluminum had to be used for something. We had hundreds of thousands of gallons of the stuff. This went beyond our usual scale of construction, beyond furniture, art projects, foil textiles, or flatware. I’d have to build something big. So during the two weeks it took to prep our hole, I built the glider.

  Every kid in the galaxy can fold a paper airplane. I’d won competitions with mine when I was growing up back on Earth. This was no different. Aluminum was fantastic for aircraft—slick and light at an atomic level, 13 protons, 13 electrons and a fluffy, fat-free centre. What it wasn’t was very strong. Aluminum has what they call an “unpredictable fatigue limit,” which meant that it might hold for a long time, or it might crumple without a moment’s notice for no good reason except that 13 isn’t a good number for a solid, symmetrical molecular structure. But origami had that problem long before industry did. Paper isn’t strong enough to contain a good-sized kitten, and yet if you fold it just right, you can build a structure strong enough to stand on. Folded aluminum creations could be almost indestructible. It was all about the physics.

  Once we’d folded it, the glider looked good. The body was 40 f
eet long and thin, with a big dorsal fin. The cockpit was latticed to redirect air while maintaining decent visibility. The wings were long and wide, running the length of the body, and angled ever so slightly upward, with an acute upward fold at the tips. A wedge under the nose could be controlled with a pedal to adjust altitude, and nubs on the wings controlled steering. I was having trouble with landing gear. I couldn’t work out a way to extend wheels without risking arcing. As much as I wanted to fly, I wasn’t willing to be blown up over it. So I tinkered.

  “That’s poetic, Trev,” Ruby quipped, coming up behind me as I sketched plans. “Out of the earth and into the air! Could this thing reach the flight deck?” She paced the length of the craft where it lay in triage in my workshop.

  “Maybe,” I said evasively. Admittedly, the glider looked more like a rocket. That was the twelve-year-old in me. I’d always wanted to fly a spaceship. “It’s designed for lower altitude travel…”

  “How are you going to get it off the ground? These things need to start high, don’t they?”

  “It uses a winch-launch,” I explained. “Or maybe I’ll get some of the inmates to carry it up Mt. Joshua for me. I’m sure the Warden would be willing to reward a few of his hulks with a day in Beauform.”

  “Ha ha.” Ruby looked queasy. “So speaking of which. Your hole’s empty.”

  “What?” I spun around on my stool, dropping my tablet. “Already? I thought you were going to need weeks for the entrance?”

  “Yah, me too. But I was able to break up the metal at our entry site with some superheated boring injections. Crumble ’n’ scoop, easy-peasy. It’s pretty in there, too. I left a coating of cryolite to cool. It’s all crystal-y!”

  “Crystalline.”

  “Shut up, Trevor, you’re not a geologist. It’s crystal-y. More important, so gorgeous! When do we move in?”

  I laughed. “Let’s, you know, keep the place quiet, okay? Hidey-hole. We can’t exactly hold a launch party down there. Give me a few days to install some furnishing, some life support systems… We’ll have a camp-out, you and I. It’ll be fun.”

  “It’ll be toasty. The geothermal in there is nuts. But yah, we’ll have a blast. You’ve seemed tense lately, Trev. I think this’ll be good for you.” Ruby had moved back to my side, and she put a sympathetic hand on the back of my neck.

  “Mmm, that feels good.” I closed my eyes. It did. I’d been hunched over my tablet all day every day for two weeks. I felt like I’d become a hunchback. Ruby tucked her little fingers into a fist and started rubbing her knuckles over my knotted muscles and I couldn’t help but go slack, turning myself over to her expert care. It was nice, and more than that, reassuring.

  “Trevor!” The boy’s voice startled the shit out of me and I almost fell off my seat trying to get into a flight position. I started to laugh at my own absurdity until I saw the look on his face: the whites of his eyes, the tug of his lip as if he was struggling not to cry. He’d been my apprentice for two years now, but he was only fifteen.

  “What? What happened?” I started walking towards him, instinctively taking Ruby by the hand.

  “They just radioed in…the Warden…the guy, the SAM4—uh, 3…Agustin, Trevor! He’s out.”

  I looked at Ruby, who just stared in disbelief. I wished I could apologize for this. “How long?” I asked, finding my mouth dry.

  “Twenty minutes ago. They managed to hit the disassembly on the tram, but he has the Warden’s gear and his—he took everything from the Warden.” The boy stumbled over that part, and I closed my eyes. I’m sorry, Neil Khan. “He’ll just walk, won’t he? He’ll be here.”

  “It’s a long walk. Even at a jog it’s three hours. At least. But it’s okay.” I looked at Ruby again and squeezed her hand. “We have a plan.”

  We’d always known someone would come for us in Beauform eventually. It was time for Agustin’s last trap.

  Evacuating everyone to the hidey-hole—hastily nicknamed Ruby’s Retreat—took slightly less than an hour. We’d wanted to build a tunnel from town to the Retreat, but we’d run out of time, so all 237 residents of Beauform were marched across the frozen waste nervously clutching packs full of flashlights, dried fruit and playing cards, driven by Ruby’s grim efficiency and the horror that followed in the wake of the rumours that took approximately five minutes to reach every ear in town.

  One of the prisoners has escaped. He killed the Warden and half a battalion of armed guards—tore them limb from limb. He’s as big as a bear. He’s immune to tranqs. He’s half-man, half-snake. He can’t be killed. He doesn’t want us, just what we have. Just leave it. Leave it and go.

  In fact, we didn’t know what his new mutation might be. My boy had taken the message, and he’d been too scared to ask for specifics. I could only imagine how Agustin could have got out of my trap. Maybe he’d shrunk, small enough to stroll out the ventilation system. If only.

  I was the last to leave town. It had been easy to justify, given my leadership role in our evacuation, but Ruby hadn’t been happy about it. She’d gone first, to lead the way. She wanted me with her. To be honest, I was surprised by how powerfully I wanted to be with her. But I had one last thing to deal with.

  I rolled up the curtain wall of my workshop, admitting a harsh blast of frozen air. My workshop faced the east, towards a thin tongue of Lake Xiaoxiong and the glacier bridge that led to the tram line. Dressed in my thermals, I jogged out towards the lake, anchored my winch, and hauled the long rope back to my glider, tying it to the nose of the trailer. Then I raced back to the winch and hit the big yellow button.

  This sucked as a one-man job, but I had no choice. The winch shook and wobbled as it drew my plane out of the shed, narrowly avoiding clipping the frame with the starboard wing by half a foot. Once the glider had trundled clear of the shed, I shut off the winch, wheeled the trailer around by hand, and turned to move the winch again, extending it to its full 1000 foot length, then turned to jog back down the glacier strip.

  “Trevor.”

  I winced at the voice, and turned slowly. Agustin seemed posed out there on the snow, an imposing statue of cut muscles and throbbing veins carved from russet sandstone. He’d stripped almost naked, clothed instead with straps and belts holding weapons, tools, harnesses and supplies. His flesh was a dark rust-red, and even at this distance, I could see a squall of steam rising from his skin.

  I held up my hands. “Agustin,” I greeted him. “What can I get for you?”

  “Good answer.” He crossed the distance between us with a shark-white grin plastered to his face. I didn’t dare move a muscle. “I knew you’d have a solution for me. You have a solution for everything.”

  “That’s what I do.” I tried to look relaxed and jovial, knowing it was absurd under the circumstances. At closer range, I could see Agustin was deeply uncomfortable. He was sweating buckets despite being fully exposed to the deadly-cold air, and his breathing was laboured. He ran one hand over his bald head, gathering a mitt-full of sweat. It was ice by the time it hit the ground. He looked over my shoulder at the glider.

  “Going somewhere?” he asked.

  “Not if you don’t want me to,” I chose my words carefully, eying his foot-long hands. They seemed studded with metal, accented with char. I realized belatedly how he must have gotten out of the trap. He’d melted the aluminum.

  Somehow, he’d become a human heat inductor. I swallowed, brain humming at the implications. Just keep him stable. Don’t get killed before you’ve had a chance to think. “I’m the last one here. If you need my help, I’ll give it. Just don’t—you don’t need to—” I stuttered, the words needed to beg for my life not coming easily.

  “They’ve all gone, hey? Evacuated, I guess? This is it, then? The last train outta Dodge?” He stepped towards me, and it was all I could do not to step back. I wanted to keep his attention on the glider, away from the footprints Ruby had left behind on the exodus to the Retreat. “I don’t suppose it seats two?”

 
It didn’t. I glanced over my shoulder at the glider, then back at Agustin, affecting a pained look on my face.

  “Please,” I begged. “Everyone I know—all my friends, all my neighbours…”

  “Your friends?” Agustin spit, suddenly angry. He wiped another fistful of sweat off his face in frustration. “Your neighbours? You haven’t been locked in a box for two years. You weren’t put on a one-way ship to an iceball limbo for the crime of doing your job.”

  “I understand, Agustin. I just—”

  “If you understand, than shut your mouth now and stop asking for consideration you don’t deserve! I should light you up for those traps. I should turn you into a candle wick, like I did the Warden.” Agustin reached his big, red hand towards me, steaming. My thermals were foil, but my flesh wasn’t. The way the ice had been shifting lately, I knew he could not only burn me to a crisp, but set off half the town. He must have understood the look on my face, because he burst out laughing. “But I’m not going to risk blowing up your pretty ride, Trevor. You’re lucky today. I just want a ticket home. I am going to get on that evacuation ship,” he pointed at the sky, “and it is going to go where I want it to go.” He stepped closer to me, and the heat coming off his body was blistering. I looked away, cowering. “I think I might just go up there and slaughter your whole damn town!” He turned and paced a few steps away, tripping over his own feet and laughing. “I should! That would serve them right. If they think I’m an enemy, I’ll show them what an enemy I can be! They have no idea! No idea!”

  He was shouting now, and his body seemed even redder than before. I needed to say something, for him to see me scared. I just wanted to go hide with the others, but he would find us all if I didn’t do something.

  So, I bolted. I ran past him, ducking under his big arm as it came around to clock me, racing for the winch. He seemed to take a minute to react, shaking his head as if he was dizzy, then making a staggered start after me. I jumped, diving into the ice and smacking the power button hard as I hit the ground next to the winch. The rope started winding, and I hammered it two more times, setting it to full speed before rolling onto my back and bringing my arms over my face, in case Agustin was there to crush my skull.