Often, they had been in the middle of a training session, soaking up some aspect of the knowledge they required to perform their assigned role in the colonisation program. Then, without any ceremony, they had been dumped on the surface of a planet hitherto unknown to them, in a completely different part of the galaxy than the one they were expecting to travel to.
They were all clearly intelligent and no doubt diligent people, who believed implicitly they would voyage to, and settle on, the moon and Mars. Yet, equally clearly, few of them possessed the requisite talents and skills to be useful on a long and potentially dangerous space flight, or in the settlements they were to live in. Trev thought most of them were also a bit long in the tooth. He imagined space flight and pioneering on the inhospitable surface of the moon or Mars was a young person’s game.
Half a dozen of these strays had turned up over the last few weeks. They had passed the initial induction and screening process aimed at weeding out all those unsuitable for life in a colony on a relatively hostile planetary surface. While you didn’t have to be technologically savvy to be useful to the program, a reasonable level of fitness and common sense was preferred. It was amazing how many of the people who had flocked to the MFY program had few of those attributes. They were simply dreamers with no useful skills, with only one thing in common: they were fertile.
It was exciting to be a part of the mission, but when the rubber hit the road, few MFYers were really prepared to trade in their lives on planet Earth. They were not about to leave jobs, friends, and families for a risky and possibly short life in a colony on the moon or Mars, no matter how unhappy they were at home. They were content to freeload of the MFY organisation until such time their services were no longer required. At some point they were in for a rude awakening.
The men Trev found wandering about the planet were generally earnest types who were fanatical about subjects nobody else cared about and were mostly data analysts in their former lives. IT departments the world over were full of them: the guys who knew everything about the corporate data mart and how it should be improved and expected everyone else to understand and agree with their logical point of view. These attributes went hand in hand with difficulties with interpersonal relationships.
After passing through the initial selection process, most of the geeks couldn’t quite believe their prayers had been answered. Finally, their skills were going to be recognised and they were about to become an integral part of an awe-inspiring enterprise.
Trev’s initial impression of the strays was correct: owning a bar had made him a good judge of character if nothing else. They were geeks and borderline autistic, most of them had experienced recent setbacks in their lives, and they were looking for something meaningful and fulfilling to live for. Eventually, despite their limitations, they were all relatively self-aware, or had had a kind of epiphany and realized that, despite their excitement at being a part of the project, something was amiss at the MFY site. When they reached this point, the Transcendent took decisive action and uploaded them to Skid.
Trev didn’t have the gumption to realise he wasn’t stumbling on these men by accident. He was being guided to them to take them to a place of safety. He knew the Transcendents, builders of the autonomous AI in control of the MFY program, must be running a process to keep the MFYers in line at the South Australian training facility to stop them going rogue, trying to leave, or ask probing questions. Perhaps they put a sedative in the water or something. However, he never considered he was also under the influence of the MPU, and his will was not one hundred percent his own.
Trev knew the elephant in the room was: who in their right mind would believe an organisation which had been in existence for less than two years could develop the infrastructure from scratch to send people into space? Certainly, nobody outside the program believed it possible. When rockets started lifting off from the Woomera site, there was a lot of conjecture around who was really behind the program. While Trev self-importantly thought he was one of the few humans who knew exactly what was going on, he was only a couple of steps up the ladder in the grand scheme of things from Morris Thwaites.
“How’s it going?” Trev asked as he pulled up alongside and stopped.
“How do you think it's going?” Morris replied, a little more aggressively than he had intended. It was the kind of response he fired off when someone from the business asked him a stupid question or doubted the integrity of the data he provided. It wasn’t his fault the input data was such a mess. He’d been telling them for years… but he was a long way from his previous job.
“Where am I?”
“Have a drink,” Trev suggested, offering Morris some bottled water.
Nothing was making sense to Morris. It had been a surreal experience finding himself standing on a grassy field in the middle of nowhere talking to a man with an odd strangled accent, when just moments before he had been in the middle of a desert. He was beginning to wonder if he was in having a seizure or meltdown of some kind and was hallucinating. The man he was talking to was real enough, and so was the ground beneath his feet. But he couldn’t be sure.
While he was trying to work out what to do next, he eyed the truck suspiciously and fought a sudden urge to jump in. It seemed the obvious thing to do, but he wasn’t convinced it was the best move he'd ever make.
“Look, mate, jump in and I’ll take you home, give you something to eat and drink, then I can go some way to explaining what is going on.” Morris thought Trev sounded like a mildly dangerous nutter.
“Um.. I’ll explain what I can because I’m not sure why you’ve turned up here,” Trev added in such an offhand manner Morris was left feeling more uneasy than ever, but he climbed into the passenger seat of the truck after tossing his bag in the back. There didn't seem to be any other option.
He was momentarily confused when he realised the passenger seat was on the wrong side of the vehicle. Was this guy Australian or British?
“My name is Trev,” Trev said, offering his hand.
“Morris Thwaites. Can you tell me what the situation is here?”
“Well, I know where we are and why I am here. But, sorry, I can’t shed any light on what brings you here ahead of schedule. It is a bloody mystery to me too.”
Morris found none of this information reassuring. He fumbled for the door handle ready to leap out and take his chances if the situation deteriorated. The truck was still moving at walking pace as Trev swung onto a faint track worn into the long grass. Morris was beyond leaping, if he was honest with himself, but he thought he might just be able to roll out of the door without injuring himself.
“You shouldn’t be here, really. But, don’t worry about it, you’re quite safe,” Trev explained, achieving the opposite of reassuring Morris and making him feel comfortable. By this time, the truck had sped up to the point that staying aboard was less risky than leaping out and breaking his neck.
“Look, I know how weird this is. I know you're from the MFY program down in South Australia and this is an outpost of the MFY program, but one you were not supposed to learn about until the project is a bit further down the track. What I don’t understand is why you are here ahead of schedule,” Trev repeated, “but I think I can guess why.”
“So where are we then and how did I get here? One minute I was in a training session learning how to use an environmental control system I would never in a thousand years understand or be able to put back together intact. Next thing I know, I'm in an enormous space, like a big empty airport terminal, then I was dumped on my backside over there.” Morris waved his hand out the window.
“You’re on a planet called Skid, believe it or not.”
Morris chose not to believe Trev. He reached for the handle to wrench the door open. He would simply fall out, and bugger the consequences, he had to get away from this madman. When the door wouldn’t open, he rammed his shoulder into it as hard as he could in the confined space of the cab. It stubbornly remained closed.
Trev didn’t ha
ve a mean bone in his body. However, he was oblivious to the impact his glib statement, a ham-fisted attempt at a joke, had on people like Morris when he was picking them up.
“It’s a part of the MFY program,” Trev repeated, “related to colonisation, though the purpose of the MFY organisation is very different to what you have been led to believe.”
“I am not sure I follow. What do you mean?” Morris felt a bit more relaxed now. Trev was obviously a nutter, but a harmless enough nutter. Morris tried to place his accent. It wasn’t familiar to him. There was a hint of a Kiwi accent, overlaid by a vague west coast American drawl, overlaid with something else again. Maybe the man wasn’t taking all his medication?
Trev glanced at Morris and caught his eye. The two men regarded each other warily from either side of the cab for what felt like an eternity, while Trev decided how much he wanted to share with Morris.
“Well, the MFY program is about getting anyone who wants to, into space. But the colonies on the moon and Mars are a front for the real thing: the real action is going to be here.” Trev took his hands off the steering wheel and waved them about. “And this planet has real aliens. Sort of.”
Morris regarded Trev nervously and wondered if he needed to revise the harmless tag he had given Trev.
“Are you an alien too?” he blurted out, still fumbling vainly for the door handle.
“Nope, I am as human as you are, and the so-called aliens you’ll meet here are as human as you and I are too, albeit with a few enhancements. The few of them left alive, that is,” Trev added.
Morris pinched himself and realised this action wouldn’t help. If this was a dream, then he would surely feel or experience a simulation of a pinch.
“The real aliens are the Transcendents.” Trev hesitated in case they were listening in to the conversation. Trev liked to think he was important, but the Transcendents had far better things to do with their time than listen to him rabbit on. “They evolved here on this planet and then somehow, don’t ask me the details because its way above my pay grade,” Trev took both hands off the steering wheel again and waved them theatrically above his head, “they uploaded themselves to a galactic version of the cloud.”
“You expect me to believe you?”
“Well, it’s the truth. I know it is a little hard to accept the first time you hear it, but it is true. Believe me. The reason you’re here is you have started to unravel the conditioning they use on people which stops anyone questioning how the project was stood up so fast, when government space agencies who have been in the game for decades don’t possess the capability to mount a manned mission to the moon, let alone build a Martian colony.”
Morris was thoughtful for a moment. This explanation made some sort of sense to him, as he had asked those questions, if only of himself.
“So where are you from and what are you doing here?” he asked.
“Well, it’s a little complicated to be honest,” Trev replied. “I’ll explain on the way, we haven’t got far to go.”
Five
As the rocket began to shudder, accompanied by the roar of the engines as it accelerated into the sky, Janice found herself above, and staring down at, the rapidly receding vehicle. She didn’t even have time to process this improbable sight.
As the images and sounds of the launch faded, the crew found themselves in an enormous cavern, still securely strapped to their acceleration couches, rolling towards what could only be described as a doorway to a different dimension. Beyond it, nothing was clearly visible. All Janice could discern was darkness, filled with bright dots, like the night sky full of stars.
Rolling toward the exit, Janice understood the mission had failed, and this came as a huge disappointment to her. They might have made it into space, but they were no longer in their module. She reckoned she must be experiencing a last microsecond of clarity, of consciousness, before her physical self was obliterated in the explosion ripping through the body of the rocket beneath her.
Janice didn’t have time to sob or start screaming. She quickly came to terms with the fact her relatively short life was over before it really began, while she rolled on. And then...
She discovered they weren’t dead. Either that or there was life after death.
They were careering down an endless tunnel, where time passed excruciatingly slowly. Then, without warning, they landed unceremoniously on, and slid across the floor of, a space she immediately recognised as the control room of the Mars colony that was to be their home. Somewhere along the line, they had parted company with their space suits and the couches they had been strapped into.
“That’s not supposed to happen,” someone muttered.
“Where are we?” It was Robert asking the question. It felt like an eternity since she had last heard his voice. “And how did we get here?”
“It looks like the settlement control room,” Janice replied, “or at least a very good copy of it.”
“How can this be?” another voice she didn’t immediately recognise asked. “The last thing I remember was the final countdown, and then we were in a big terminal. I thought it was curtains for us.”
“It must have been real, because I remember that as well,” Janice heard herself say.
One by one, each of them stood and reached out for something to steady themselves. They were all a little stiff and unsteady on their feet, but otherwise OK and began to take in their surroundings.
“Those bastards! I knew it.” Janice muttered. “It was all a big fraud and those MFY fuckers have suckered us all and spirited us off to a movie set to play make-believe.” Janice couldn’t believe she had allowed herself to be taken in. “I’m not going to play ball with them. If they think I am going along with this charade, they have another thing coming.”
“It’s a pretty realistic looking illusion. Look outside. Someone has spent some serious cash and effort making this look the part,” Bill Sugden, one of the other crew members remarked. He sounded relieved that they hadn’t made it into space. “Let’s see if we can get out of here and see what’s going on.”
“How did the MFY guys send us here?” Robert asked. “We must have been drugged or something because I don’t recall anything after the launch countdown started and the rockets ignited.”
Janice was angry and frustrated she had allowed herself to be taken for a ride by the MFY Ponzi scheme, but she also found she was quite happy to be alive. She belatedly brushed away a lock of unruly hair from her face. It was easy to forget in the intensity of the training and the excitement of being selected to go to Mars that the MFY project was being funded by a reality TV show and there were cameras everywhere, recording every move they made.
So, this was how the Ponzi scheme was going to work: drone cameras would follow the successful crew members all the way to Mars, recording every aspect of their lives until they were relieved by a future mission, or more probably, succumbed to any number of physical ailments they would not be able to treat, or were undone by a major equipment failure.
It was quite possible they would starve to death if they couldn’t get the little farm to produce enough food to supplement the supplies they had brought with them. They all hoped the cameras would be turned off if it all got too messy and undignified, but they had all signed waivers giving the MFY team access to all parts of their lives, for the rest of their existence, and messy endings were the bread and butter of good reality television. They all knew the filming would continue until the end.
If this scenario was for real, following a carefully staged ceremony to record the first human landing on the planet, with each of them emerging from the lander in assigned order, they would have gone to straight to work. Their training would kick in and they would have moved to their assigned work stations and pulled out their checklists to begin the work of bringing the colony to life, making sure all the systems were fully functional before the next mission with more colonists was launched.
Today, all training and structure was forgotte
n. They milled about the control room getting their bearings and discovered there were a few critical differences between this facility and the one they had trained in. The hatch at the rear of the room opened into a corridor and a series of chambers crammed with equipment and stores, instead of the airlock they expected to find. Another hatch at the end of this corridor was jammed or locked, because no amount of effort could get it to budge.
Janice decided it must have been secured to prevent their escape. They all believed it was the exit into a vast movie lot, a mock-up that the settlement had been built in, and not the surface of Mars.
The crew explored the base further and discovered that most of the activities they had been trained to perform to expand their new home were already complete. Several other corridors branched off the main control room. One branch was an accommodation area, showing no sign of recent occupation. The other led to the farm, the first area they needed to get up and running to ensure their long-term survival. There they found that some of the crops were close to maturity.
Janice wondered whether the audience noticed these details. There was another glaring anomaly. Their landing module should have been visible through the observation window, but it was nowhere in sight.
Bill Sugden found their space suits hanging up outside an airlock in a different area of the small complex than they expected. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t open the outside door, even after trying the two fail-safe backup systems. It was starting to look like someone had locked them in on purpose. This had the effect of relaxing them a little because they were still alive yet pissing them off even more because it went some way to confirming the view they were imprisoned somewhere on Earth.
Janice sensed something looked different about the spacesuits and checked them over. It was clear who they belonged to, because their names were printed on them, but she was sure they weren’t the same ones they had worn in the rocket. They looked more sophisticated and slightly less bulky somehow, but she couldn’t put her finger on the precise differences. However, they were spotlessly clean, showing no signs of the wear and tear she would have expected after the long flight from earth. In a cabinet on the other side of room, there were spares for everyone, plus a few extras.
The Colonists Page 4