“Fire all engines... three, two, one, we have...”
The rocket shuddered, started to lift off the pad when the engines went to full power and then exploded, showering flaming debris everywhere.
Bruce stood in front of the mirror trying to knot his tie, while listening to a feed of Chump’s speech and the failed launch. He gave up with the tie because he couldn’t multi-task. He’d have to get Ngaio to do it for him.
We are going to have to let some of these launches succeed or get close to the asteroid otherwise people will lose interest in them. When they start sending manned missions we will have to get the crews off, he mused for the benefit of the Transcendents.
He’d Googled instructions on how to tie a Windsor knot, but that didn’t seem to help much, and he could think of better things to do than practise to get it right for his wedding day.
It was necessary to keep an eye on Chump in case he went off the reservation, something he was inclined to do without warning, and whipped up his audience into a lather of fury and expectation. It never ceased to amaze Bruce how many ignorant bigots had crawled out from under a rock now Chump’s star had ascended.
The man just didn’t seem to understand he was inciting one section of the population to revolt against the rest and endorsing the use of violence and a refusal to compromise on the simplest issues. Bruce suspected the man had an undiagnosed neurological disease, given his erratic behaviour, but this didn’t explain how so many people lapped up his every utterance and believed his fabrications. The man was a menace and Bruce knew they were playing a dangerous game by getting him elected, but they had decided the risk was worth it. Eventually Chump would be spirited away to join Mitch in exile.
Managing Chump on a day to day basis was the General, a safe pair of hands. But there was a lot at stake here. The last thing they needed was for Chump to go off on a tangent before the MFYers, and the people who had set up camp outside the facility, had been uploaded to Skid.
“What the fuck!?” A ticker tape banner rolled across the screen announcing a boat load of refugees had been machine-gunned in the water by an Italian warship. A news media drone had captured the atrocity while it had been in the area, recording the miserable experience of those aboard the boats leaving North Africa for Europe. The report went on to say no bodies had been recovered and further investigations were under way.
“Now what’s going on? Was that us? Who sanctioned it?” Bruce caught his breath and replayed some recent conversations. “You uploaded them to the asteroid, didn’t you?”
Yes Bruce, the Transcendents replied meekly.
Fuck! Haven’t you lot got any bloody patience? Aren’t we planning to start uploading for real in a few weeks once we have most of the bugs ironed out of the online introduction and training programs? The last thing we need is a whole lot of people running around Skid without any idea why they are there or how to access the basic amenities they need to survive. We also need to engage with Lake. He is going to have to explain to his people how a larger, more diverse population is essential for the long-term survival of the Skidian race, whether they like it or not.
Bruce sighed. He had enough drama in his life without worrying that the upload program was going to be de-railed before they were ready to implement it. For beings who described themselves as data constructs stored in a sophisticated version of the cloud, the Transcendents displayed some very organic, humanlike emotions at times, impatience being a key one of them.
Top of Bruce's mind, however, was getting married and trying to keep the peace between his mother and mother-in-law to be. As the wedding day drew closer, the two women were at each other’s throats. They would be lucky to survive the next few weeks without one of them going for the other with a carving knife. To cap it all off, he and Ngaio were going to postpone their honeymoon until after lambing, so they wouldn’t be able to escape any time soon. They were going to slip off to the Tauroa family bach for a few days before the upload process kicked off in earnest.
On reflection, it was a silly time of the year to get married, but Ngaio had insisted the timing was right based on her family traditions and an endorsement from a customary spiritual presence Bruce had hitherto been oblivious to. He wasn’t going to argue about it, given he was in constant contact with a form of spirit entity all his own.
This reminded him to keep a careful eye out to see which one of his neighbours the Transcendents would download into for the wedding. He had to make sure they behaved appropriately. They, or at least one of them had insisted on attending, despite maintaining it didn’t understand why the offworlders persisted with this outdated ritual. Bruce suspected this was just a ruse, and the Transcendents took every opportunity to download into a real body just as often as it could, drink too much than was good for its host and misbehave like a randy adolescent.
Twelve
“Oh no!” Janice gasped. Other colonists used far stronger language to express their frustration at the sight of the rocket blowing up on the launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Kennedy Space Centre. Each mission failure was a huge disappointment because it meant rescue was still some way off. They had all agreed that, whether they were on Mars or not, a successful mission would eventually lead to their liberation. Missions often failed or were delayed, so another spectacular disaster wasn’t a total surprise, but it highlighted how successful the MFY launches were. Not one of them had failed.
The population of the small colony had swelled since the first landing. There were now twelve of them sitting around the table in the communal area, focused on the big screen. Some of them were fiddling with the tablets they had been issued, each one personalised and cloned from the devices they had all left back in their quarters at the MFY facility.
These tablets were an awkward size. Too big to fit comfortably into a pocket of their coveralls. Too small to need a bag to carry them around in, and, they could only receive incoming messages from the outside world. They were unable to transmit messages of any kind, except to other people in the settlement. This was a cause of major frustration and anger because not only had they found themselves a step removed from an adoring public, their android clones were having the private conversations with their loved ones that they should have been enjoying. Even worse was how well the androids had managed to replicate them. Nobody back on earth had twigged they weren’t dealing with the real colonists. It was spooky.
The androids were responding more than adequately to the deluge of messages sent to them, keeping friends, family, MFY control, and their millions of fans updated on their every move. It was disturbing to see just how well these machines responded on their behalf. Janice felt a little inadequate at the way the androids articulated their feelings about life on Mars and in the colony. She believed the others felt the same way, even if they didn’t discuss it openly amongst themselves. They hadn’t been looking forward to being recorded in real time, but they felt a sense of loss now the opportunity had been denied them.
Because the androids had taken their place, the human colonists were pretty much at a loose end, a novel situation for them. They were all high achievers and not used to having spare time on their hands. They had undergone intense training to ensure they could live in the colony and manage its infrastructure, but it was of no use to them now. The environmental systems keeping them alive ran autonomously. They were locked out of all control systems and they weren't even allowed to regulate the heating in their quarters.
There had been no contact with anyone outside their little world, other than the man who had materialised amongst them and just as quickly vanished. They didn’t really know what to make of him. A man smelling like sheep shit, looking like he had just stepped off a farm, didn’t fit anyone’s idea of a senior representative of a major organisation, let alone a space traveller. They did agree that it was a neat trick for him to simply appear unannounced in their midst and disappear the same way.
Janice imagined someone would eventually have to front and ex
plain themselves, but no one turned up.
The one thing they all took seriously were the safety drills, the same ones they had practised back on Earth. At regular intervals, warnings would sound, and the colonists would rush to their emergency posts and respond to the latest simulated failure.
These tests mostly related to some form of rapid de-pressurisation of their environment and the scenarios were many and varied. Some of them were caused by an equipment failure and others by objects making rather large holes in the exterior walls. Some of the scenarios were simply not survivable, which didn’t provide much comfort to the colonists. They were a reminder that Mars was a hazardous place to live. They had also practised recovery scenarios with some of them trapped outside on the Martian surface, even though none of them had made it out of the settlement yet. What finally convinced them there was a possibility they really might be on Mars (and not a movie set on Earth) was how all the practise runs included getting into their space suits as rapidly as possible, but it could just as easily have been a ploy. The drills did give them the reassurance that they were intended to survive, at least in the short term. Why practise keeping them alive otherwise?
Janice, Robert, Bill and one or two of the other colonists soon decided if the practise runs were real, the suits would function in the Martian environment in the event of an incident. They thought that if they could only get outside, onto the surface of the planet, they might somehow put an end to the fiction they were part of. If they could get in front of the cameras and confront the androids, or simply parade around outside, it would show the world the MFY program was a sham. Or maybe - and it was a very slight maybe - it might be possible to return to Earth, if they could fire up the lander and return to orbit in time to rendezvous with the next outbound mission.
They had already practised lift-offs from the surface in the event that a return mission was mounted from Earth by a government agency and they had to get back into space to meet it.
Janice realised almost everyone at the MFY facility in Australia truly believed the mission to Mars was authentic and had worked to this end. Why plan for the possibility of a relief mission otherwise? But, if they were on Mars, why had they been superseded by the androids? What was the point of travelling all this way to be confined to base?
“Is the bomb ready?” Bill asked. “I think it’s time to find out what’s really going on here.”
Janice and Bill convinced themselves if they could manufacture an incident, they might be able to get the airlock external doors to open and get outside. This would confirm they were on the surface of Mars one way or another, for what it was worth. Nobody else had any better ideas so they all agreed it was worth a try.
“It will be shortly,” Robert confirmed. He had spent some time in the military engineers prior to his astronaut training and he had been able to construct a bomb from materials they found in the settlement, no mean feat considering most of the available resource was fire-retardant. A decent blaze could be the end of the small settlement.
“I'm just making the detonator. I just need a few minutes to put everything together.” Robert sounded confident, but he had been repeating the same line for days and still hadn’t managed to produce the device. Janice needed to prompt him every day which she found frustrating and a source of growing concern. Robert was losing his mojo.
“You know we could be signing our death warrant here?” Janice reminded them. “There are a number of ways this could go wrong. The suits might not work, or the bomb might blow a bigger hole in the structure than intended. It might provide the MFYers with the excuse and opportunity they need to kill us off and tidy things up.”
“Yeah. But unless we all want to sit around and wait for a rescue which might never come, we need to try something.”
“Bill’s right,” one of the other men piped up. “It doesn’t look like anyone is coming to get us any time soon, given the state of that!” He pointed to an image of the smoking ruins of the rocket on the television. In a small corner window, there was a live feed of a deflated Chump being led away from the podium.
Even from their distant and isolated perspective, they could all see and hear how the new Presidency had hit a few speed bumps. Chump flip-flopped from one issue to another, alienating his support base in the process. Surprise, surprise: it hadn’t taken his voters long to discover he never intended to honour his key campaign pledges, including putting a stop to space exploration, and the money pit that manned voyages to the moon and Mars would become.
Historically, Chump had opposed federal funding of anything relating to scientific research and space exploration, except where the military was concerned. His pre-election flip-flop into supporting massive expenditure on new space programs didn’t seem to do him too much harm though. He had long since mastered the ability to publicly tell a bare-faced lie and get away with it, and simply reverse any statement he made, blaming the media for incorrect reporting and making him look bad. Or, if this strategy failed, simply shout people down by screaming longer and louder.
His behaviour resonated with a large chunk of his support base. It played to their view that government was by its very nature wasteful and largely irrelevant in a modern world. Small government, low taxes, and a market-driven economy was the American way, unless a bailout was required, then the government was responsible for everything and digging them out of the shit. Many of his supporters had become empowered by Chump’s populist statements on issues close to their heart. Initially, he fed their sense of loss for the good old days, their irrational fear of exploitation by mythical dark forces beyond their control, and their entitlement to a better deal in life. Few of them fully appreciated the signals he was sending, and his bully-boy behaviour suggested to many impressionable people that this behaviour was acceptable in a modern society. He behaved like a misogynist demagogue, preying on the fears and superstitions of one large section of the population by demonizing another. To add to the confusion he caused, he had occasionally had moments when he behaved and sounded presidential and made a lot of sense. Unfortunately, these periods were very rare, and he required constant supervision.
People had taken their lead from him, lapping up his rhetoric like the Germans of the thirties, and began to believe Chump could deliver a new prosperity and a stronger America, all of which would be good for them personally. This was a complete irony, for he was the kind of American businessman who had been steadily killing off the middle class for years by exporting their jobs overseas to low wage economies and removing benefits and protections and from those who remained in decent well-paid jobs.
Then the conversation began to change, followed by the policy flip-flops shortly after he took office. However, the signs had been there before the election. Overnight, just weeks before election day, he had toned down his language and cut back on his more extreme views, becoming a man with a new, more conciliatory message. Something had happened, but only those closest to him noted his former energy and drive were missing.
These changes in direction came too quickly for his supporters to comprehend. First there was his new-found support for the space program. This was a minor road bump compared with coming out in support of gun control, immigration amnesties, and a woman’s right to have an abortion. When these policy changes were announced, supported by executive orders to get the ball rolling for the legislative process, his support base went into spasms of shock. However, without any other choice, bar an opposition candidate they loathed for no better reason that he was from the other side of the political spectrum, they still voted for Chump in droves.
Chump should have been excited at winning, but he looked and acted like a broken man.
“It’s worth the risk, I reckon. The MFY organisation won’t have much of a show without us.” This was wishful thinking because the androids were doing an excellent job of emulating them, right down to who was sleeping with who, and could carry on doing so, at least until a relief mission was successfully mounted and the gre
at con was revealed.
It was fascinating, and just a little creepy, how the behaviour of the androids mimicked their own. It showed that while nobody from the MFY team was in direct contact, someone was keeping a close eye on them.
“So, when do we do this?” Janice asked.
“I think we should sleep on it and if we are still of the same mind in the morning, we should suit everyone up after breakfast and detonate our bomb, said Robert.
“Should we re-think this plan?” Bill asked. “If we are really on Mars and we blow a big hole in this structure and can’t get anyone’s attention, then we might be really stuffed. Now I've got here safely, I’ve decided I’m not ready to die just yet.”
Am I the only one who wants to put this plan into action? Janice asked herself. She suspected Bill and Robert appeared to be looking for a reason to back out or had lost interest in trying to establish if they were really on Mars or not.
Thirteen
Morris was left standing like a spare prick at a wedding while Trev followed the woman inside the house.
“It’s clear who wears the pants in that relationship,” he chuckled quietly.
Mitchell was sitting at a table and Morris decided to leave him alone because he didn’t know how he should approach the former President and didn’t want to intrude. He walked over to the men in MFY overalls and introduced himself. He had attended courses and seminars with at least one of the men, and the other one also looked familiar. They began to swap their experiences, but after a few moments the conversation faltered, and he felt a gentle tug at his sleeve.
“Do you know who I am?” Mitchell asked with a slight tremor in his voice.
Morris was flummoxed for a second. He had had limited interaction with the rich and famous in his life and wasn’t sure how to respond to the ex-President, especially since he had recently witnessed the man’s funeral on television. Up close he looked and sounded like any other slightly confused old man teetering on the brink of dementia.
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