The Colonists

by Keith Fenwick

  Once this stage of the plan had been executed successfully, the second phase would kick off. This involved the hoovering up of refugees from boats on the way to the European mainland and from various camps around Europe to join the MFYers on Skid. The purpose of this second wave of migrants was to provide greater population diversity, and at the same time, stem the flow of refugees pouring into Europe.

  The working theory was if boatloads of these migrants began to disappear, then this might deter would-be refugees who were considering the perilous journey and reduce the flow into the European continent. While the European nations were imminently richer than North Africa and the Middle East, they had their own problems to deal with.

  Bruce hadn’t been keen on introducing a second wave of migrants to Skid. In his view it was asking for trouble to mix an overwhelmingly well-educated, secular group of technocrats with people from under-developed nations with very different religious and cultural viewpoints. He felt it would have been a far more sensible approach to deal with the root cause issues driving migration.

  Unbeknownst to the others who thought they were running the MFY program, this was something that Bruce, with the Transcendents assistance, was in the process of addressing. They were subtly influencing the leaders of the main world powers to set aside their ideology and focus their attention on addressing the forces behind, and the behaviour of, nationalist, populist, sometimes theocratic governments, who destroyed any hope of economic development in the countries they presided over. Bruce thought if they could quickly bring true prosperity and security to these regions, the only reason for people to leave their homeland would be for a holiday.

  Zarif was surprised to see how rapidly people were settling into their new, hopefully temporary, home. Most of them had clustered into groups: some were centred around family, others with no connection to any kinfolk or community group came together for mutual security. Even when it had become evident they were in no immediate danger, they had stayed together.

  No one had found a way out of the facility, and there was no administration office they could complain to. Everyone was waiting impatiently for officials to appear and process them and send them on their way to Europe, rather than back home, but no one took charge, and this was rather disconcerting.

  Some passengers believed they were aboard a ship of some kind. Early on, some of them felt their feet lift off the floor, the sort of feeling one would experience when a ship crested a large wave and hung motionless for a moment before plunging down the other side. On hearing this theory, just about everyone insisted they could still feel the rolling motion of the trawler they had embarked on. Zarif, who had felt no such sensation, doubted they were at sea. However, he didn’t have a better explanation.

  They did have television: more channels than Zarif thought was possible. It was an interesting experience to see coverage of their empty ship being machine gunned by the Italian Coast Guard, and the aftermath of the sinking. He didn’t have a whole lot of sympathy for the crew of the vessel who had sunk the boat. If they'd been quicker to save them once the distress call had gone out, then none of them would be in the unhappy position they found now themselves.

  Zarif suspected some form of conspiracy was afoot and that he had been snagged by some recent technology developed by the Americans or the English aimed at slowing the flow of people into Europe.

  On the plus side, there was football to watch on television. Wall to wall football. While he knew he would eventually tire of having nothing to do but watch football, for now Zarif was content to spend most of his waking hours glued to one of the large televisions in the recreation area watching games by himself, or in the company of other like-minded souls. He also discovered there were digital archives. If he wanted to, he could watch every recorded game involving his beloved team, Manchester United.

  Zarif had been contentedly watching a game by himself when an announcement was made in English over an intercom, supported by subtitles on the television. Zarif spoke English well enough to get by, but his grasp of the written language wasn’t too flash.

  Someone was testing some instructions on him, but they made absolutely no sense.

  The questions seemed to relate to advertising a religious tract, for a religion Zarif didn’t recognise. Maybe the Europeans planned to coerce them into converting to Christianity as a pre-requisite for settlement on the continent, believing this would make a difference to what people believed in their hearts and how they behaved.

  He attempted to change the channel, but the advertisement was running on every single one of them. This was odd because there had been no ads until now, and Zarif grew increasingly agitated at not being able to watch the game in peace. From the howls of derision and outrage coming from elsewhere in the big dormitory, it sounded like others were suffering too.

  “Dick, you're a bloody idiot at times,” Shelly Shaw snapped at him while assessing the impact of the survey on the migrants on Automedon. “You can be an even bigger idiot than your halfwit brother and his girlfriend and that takes some doing. Why on earth did you leave this to her?”

  Dick looked suitably sheepish. Shelly was right. While Sue had taken responsibility for developing the training material for the new immigrants, he had overall accountability for the training and implementation process. He had let Sue take over because he knew she was keen to prove herself, but he had failed to make sure she kept on track. He knew he should have, and now she had let him down.

  Dick could be organised when he put his mind to it. With the MPU, he had organised the development of the Woomera facility as it expanded and became home for tens of thousands of Mars hopefuls.

  He had also been heavily involved in flinging rockets towards Mars with payloads of prefabricated modules which robots would use to create the human habitation units. With the benefit of hindsight, Dick wondered why they had bothered with the interim step of sending human colonists to lunar and Martian settlements. They should have just uploaded the astronauts straight to Skid and relied on the androids to carry on the fiction of the voyages and the landings. It really made no sense and might create a bit of a problem when they came to de-commissioning the settlements.

  More recently he had supervised the final fit out of the enormous dormitories on the asteroid Automedon.

  The last area he was responsible for was the SKUG, but documentation had never been his strong point. Dick was acutely aware of this weakness, so he had been eager to pass on the donkey work to someone else. It wasn’t as if he was trying to document the processes in a box factory with discrete inputs and outputs. This process was completely organic. Dealing with people, there was no way there could be a 'one size fits all' training solution.

  The only thing the people would want to know was how the hell had they ended up on a planet called Skid against their will, with no hope of ever seeing their homeland again. Dick's answer would be: if you feel so strongly about your home, why did you want to leave it in the first place? He knew this wasn’t the right thing to say, but it wouldn't stop him rolling it out when he couldn’t think of anything better to say in defence of the project.

  Sixteen

  Janice, you can call me Bert. How are you today?

  A voice overrode the annoying demand for her to participate in a survey that had popped up on the monitors and wouldn’t go away.

  Janice spun around. There was no one called Bert in the settlement habitat crew. The voice sounded a bit needy, desperate for acceptance and recognition.

  Her first thought was one of the androids had got lonely and decided to reach out to the humans for companionship. Stranger things had happened.

  But the last thing she needed was another distraction, because today was the day she would finally attempt to blow the airlock door control mechanism to bits to see if she could get out onto the surface and find out if they were really on Mars.

  However, Janice wasn’t having a lot of success with the small explosive package she and the others had put to
gether. She had found it incredibly difficult to make an explosive device when they didn’t have many tools and raw materials at her disposal. To make matters worse the other colonists, who had initially been keen on the idea, had gradually lost interest in the idea of escaping the settlement and left her to battle on by herself.

  Now she reckoned she had a viable bomb and had solved the final problem she’d encountered: she had managed to build a detonator.

  “Who are you?” she asked suspiciously. “Where are you? Are you a member of the mission control team?” Nobody from the control team had spoken to them since their arrival. Maybe this was about to change.

  No.

  Her next thought was that Robert was playing a trick on her. She glanced at her old boyfriend. They hadn’t spoken, let alone slept together, in days and he didn’t look up to doing anything really. She couldn’t recall anyone called Bert in the wider program. He must be someone new.

  “Bert who?” she asked.

  I am a sub-routine of the MPU, the controlling AI based on Skid and assigned to you. I maintain a continuous connection with the MPU via a micro-wormhole. However, in an emergency, I can operate autonomously. This link is not broken, it added after a pause to reassure her everything was OK, when it clearly wasn’t.

  “Skid?”

  Yes. You don’t believe we went to all this effort to get you to Mars for no reason, do you? The Mars mission is diversion, a distraction, to draw public attention away from the real purpose of the MFY program.

  “You what?” Janice couldn’t believe her ears. Was this another ploy by the producers of the MFY reality show to see how she would react? Did they have their cameras on her? She looked around the room nervously.

  The establishment of this colony is a diversion from the real mission. The MPU, or whoever or whatever Bert was, repeated the line Bruce had thrown her.

  At least these clowns are consistent, she thought.

  “What’s this got to do with me?”

  It’s a long and complicated story. I don’t plan to bore you with all the details at this stage, suffice to say your mission does involve setting up a colony. However, the mission you and everyone involved in the MFY Mars colony program thought you were working toward is not the primary objective. I thought Bruce had made this clear to you.

  “What…?” Janice found she was unable to complete the question. “Why are you talking to me? Why me?”

  She swung around to confront the rest of the crew to see how they were reacting. None of them showed any indication that they were dealing with anything unusual. They listlessly continued with whatever needless task they were performing, which for most of them was watching television. Was Bert talking to her and her alone?

  I have created a direct interface with you. Nobody else is part of this conversation. I took the liberty of installing some basic functionality in your neural nodes while you were asleep, which allows me to communicate with you.

  Janice was too stunned to respond initially. She felt a little giddy and looked for somewhere to sit while she composed herself.

  I have introduced these nodes via the medichines present in your circulatory system. The medichines keep you fit and healthy and deal with any illness or degradation of your organs. They are also ideal for introducing some of the more sophisticated Skidian interfaces and computing enhancements to your species. Don’t be alarmed, Bert added, almost as an afterthought.

  If it had intended to put Janice at ease, it hadn’t succeeded. “Why me? I’m not convinced we’re even on Mars.”

  Oh, I can assure you, you are on Mars, which was why I need to contact you directly and urgently.

  “I don’t understand the connection.”

  Well, I would very much appreciate if you stopped trying to blow a hole in the side of this habitation unit because I will be hard-pressed to effect repairs if the structure implodes. If I can’t make the repairs in time, anyone who isn’t in a space suit will suffer from rapid decompression and will die. I don’t want this to happen. I also don’t believe you will be able to convince any of your fellow crew to don their space suits in time.

  Bert paused to let Janice consider the situation. You are an extremely valuable resource and my primary task is to make sure you come to no harm, it added reassuringly.

  Janice was secretly relieved she had been found out. She glanced around the room and realised the rest of them were just going through the motions. They weren’t even working on mission-related tasks. All of them were clustered in a group in front of the television watching an old movie. When she looked a little closer, Janice realised they had been watching the same movie looping all day.

  It struck her then: none of them were following their routine to make sure the systems keeping them alive continued to function in the tough Martian environment. The systems required constant monitoring and occasional intervention to ensure the integrity of the colony. If nobody looked after them, they would soon fail, and this would result in a catastrophic malfunction and wipe them all out. The farm, the small unit designed to supplement their supplies, had not been checked in days either.

  “Shit. Have any of the plants survived?” Janice asked while alarm bells started going off in her head. “Are we doomed?” She held her breath to see if any of the others had reacted. But the only time anyone displayed any interest in their surroundings was during the daily emergency drills when everyone seemed to wake up for the duration of the drill.

  Don’t panic, said Bert calmly. That’s why I am here. My primary task is to manage all the systems keeping you alive.

  “How are you communicating with me?”

  The medichines now running through your bloodstream can easily be programmed to augment your brain’s processing power and provide various other functions. Everyone joining the MFY program is infused with these medichines, a joining bonus if you like. I have switched on the capability for you to receive signals from me.

  Janice wasn’t sure she liked the sound of this. It reminded her a little too much of mind control techniques, fit for purpose for the likes of Ronald D Chump and his cronies to enslave the population of America and the world.

  I can’t force you do anything against your will, I can’t coerce or control you which is why we are having this conversation. All I can do is try and influence you.

  Bert wasn’t really lying: its explanation was just a sanitised version of the truth solely for Janice’s benefit.

  I have sedated your fellow crew members, so that they don’t become too anxious, or attempt to escape the settlement, until we are ready for you to take the next step on your journey.

  “Where are we going?”

  To Skid of course. The final preparations are being made for the next steps of the resettlement of the planet by your species.

  “I don’t believe I’m on Mars, so I don’t believe this is a stepping stone to somewhere else. I demand to be let outside the colony settlement to prove this, and then I’ll contact the authorities and expose your scam.”

  Really? I can promise you there is much more on offer where you are going than a life on Mars, confined to this habitat, living with the constant threat of a catastrophic failure that could kill you all in an instant.

  Janice conceded Bert had a point, but she was still annoyed about was the possibility she had been duped by the MFY program and was still on Earth somewhere. If they were really on Mars and there was the possibility of travelling further into space, then she might feel different.

  I have run multiple simulations, scenarios based on a successful detonation of your primitive explosive device against the outer door of the airlock. Even if you are all suited up when the bomb goes off, your chances of survival are slim. If the rapid de-pressurisation doesn’t kill you, reinstating the colony environment is beyond your means if I am rendered inoperable or my data connection is lost, or I operate with reduced bandwidth, even temporarily. You’d be surprised by the amount of flying debris the explosion will create: many heavy, sharp
objects will fly around and possibly puncture your suits. Even if you get them on in time they might become so damaged their self -repair functionality might be overloaded.

  Bert laid it on a bit thick and conveniently avoided the obvious; the explosion wouldn’t be allowed to happen under any circumstances.

  This could be a catastrophic for the other teams en route because there would be no settlement for them to join until we rebuilt. This would show our capability before we are ready, putting the entire project in jeopardy. This might include the possibility of an assault on the South Australian MFY facility. Do you want this on your conscience?

  “Of course not!” Janice snapped. “The only project I know and care about is this colonisation mission.”

  She was now realising she might not have thought the situation through very well. When she joined the program, it had sounded like a good idea to be a part of the first colonisation mission to Mars, even though she might pay for this privilege with a relatively short life. She had bought into the idea the Earth’s main space agencies would mount a serious rescue mission for them, but now she wasn’t so sure. With the spectacular lack of success of their recent missions to investigate the asteroid Automedon, the re-supply and support missions seemed a long way off now. If the situation didn’t improve soon, they would be in trouble once the scheduled MFY missions were complete and the re-supply operations were wound down.

  I mean the mission, the real mission, to repopulate Skid of course, not this sideshow. Bert responded with a hint of exasperation in its electronic voice.

  “Do you mean the Bruce guy was right?”

  Janice sensed a big intake of breath, and wondered if this machine entity, this super computer, was in fact a human reality television show producer speaking to her through an ear piece.

  Of course. But first things first, I am in direct communication with you. However, I have limited bandwidth. We underestimated the computing capability required to run the settlement, manage the androids masquerading as the crew, and monitor the fleshie.. er.. human inhabitants. I need assistance from at least one member of the colony team to help me prepare the way for everyone who will follow. After running several tests, you were chosen because you possess all the required attributes.