It annoyed him that very few of the camp staff had taken the time to learn his language. The organisations running the camps mandated the refugees should be learning to speak the local language, or at least one of the other main European tongues, so when they were eventually processed to travel to one of these countries, they could transact daily business with the locals. However, few of the adult refugees bothered turning up to the language classes run every day in the camp and Muhammad was one of those who believed the camp staff should learn his language, so they could transact with him. The few interpreters in the camp were always in high demand.
Muhammad inadvertently let his mask of humility slip and the nurse caught a flash of his arrogance. Without a word of thanks, or acknowledgement, he rose from the chair and made his way back to the reception area. His attitude only served to confirm the prejudices of the nurse who was constantly irritated by the attitude of many of the refugee men in the camp. They haughtily believed they were somehow superior to everyone else and they expected to be waited on hand and foot.
Muhammad reminded her of the old men in the small village she came from, still desperately holding onto traditions that were now outmoded and struggling with change, while most everyone else had moved on. These men condemned the march of progress and the impact it had on their lives and beliefs, but they were quite content to reap the benefits of modern, secular life when and how it suited them. The failed to recognise the hypocrisy of yearning for the good old days, which hadn’t been good at all.
For his part, Muhammad put this momentary lapse behind him. This woman was the embodiment of all he had resolved to destroy to clear the way for his brotherhood to achieve their goal of a new Caliphate and world domination.
The Transcendents had been busy infiltrating global networks and every electronic device on the planet capable of connectivity for decades. Trillions of bots and data packages were swirling through the planet’s networks, surreptitiously slipping through firewalls and other electronic defences with ease, skipping from one network to another even when there was just the barest hint of a connection to another device, switching devices to transmit mode.
Before long the Transcendents had penetrated and compromised almost every electronic network on the planet. It had rummaged through secure databases and placed bots on devices thought to be immune from hacking because they had never been connected to an external network. Nothing could be hidden from the Transcendents and they possessed an almost infinite processing bandwidth to isolate the information they sought. It was even possible to obtain information from sources thought to be impervious to electronic surveillance. The written word was no longer safe: cameras were everywhere, taking pictures to be filed and analysed.
The Transcendents had long since identified there were many unsuitable people using the refugee routes to get entry into Europe. It had paid a lot of attention to these potential terrorists, tracking the undesirables, and feeding information about them to the military. It had known all about Muhammad and had been tracking him for weeks due to his membership of a group determined to bring terror to Europe. Now it was time to either flag this individual up to Bruce for approval, or just dump him out of the program.
The Transcendents knew what Bruce would say: even low-level agents like Muhammad should not be uploaded to Skid under any circumstances, because they would cause more trouble than they were worth. The Transcendents on the other hand was driven by a desire to rapidly upload as many fleshies as possible to Skid, and it was reluctant to discount even one potential fertile candidate, despite the danger it might pose to the future stability of Skidian society.
The Transcendents and Bruce had compromised and drawn up a set of criteria to review individual cases exactly like this one. Muhammad had been identified, with a reasonable degree of probability, as a potentially useful Skidian citizen, provided he had no contact with other like-minded people and was subjected to a little conditioning. The Transcendents held onto the possibility of this rehabilitation right up until the moment Muhammad disdainfully dismissed the nurse and reaffirmed his commitment to the Caliphate’s cause. It admitted defeat. Sometimes, there was no hope for these fleshies.
Muhammad endured the remainder of his check-up patiently. Once he was dismissed by the nurse, he walked back towards the hut he shared with a group of other single men of various ages, all real Syrian refugees who wanted nothing more than for the civil war to be over, so they could all return to their homes.
He reached the door of the hut, pushed it open and stepped into a world he had thought was now behind him.
It was a scene of absolute devastation. He stood amongst the skeletons of buildings destroyed by a combination of aerial and artillery bombardment which, judging by the sound of nearby explosions, was still in full cry. He ducked involuntarily, sensing rather than hearing a salvo of shells pass overhead and explode somewhere beyond him. He thought he recognised the town. He certainly recognised the smell filling his nostrils, the odour of burning timber and scorched masonry, of charred bodies and decaying flesh, and raw sewage leaking from obliterated sewers. The sights and the smells of the destruction of a modern city, once the home of tens of thousands of residents, most of whom had either been massacred or used as human shields by his people to deter the enemy attacks. Muhammad knew this wouldn’t slow or prevent the advance of a foe determined to annihilate them. And it hadn’t.
Another salvo of shells passed overhead. Closer this time. He knew what was coming next. Before he had time to react, he was tossed high into the air, so high there was time to look down at the Earth below and realise this experience wasn’t going to end well for him. And it didn’t.
A little later, when they had searched for Muhammad to inform him he had passed his latest medical, and discovered him missing, the camp staff scratched their heads. Why did he escape when his release, with official paperwork giving him refugee status, was just days away? Who knew what motivated such people? The camp administration team closed Muhammad’s file and never thought of him again.
Twenty-One
On the return trip, Janice enjoyed the rolling and bouncing around while she traversed the barren terrain in the rover. It was a landscape like nothing else she had ever experienced, completely devoid of any sign of human habitation, or any other form of life, and she’d experienced many different desert environments. The psychopaths who designed the survival training courses she had attended favoured hot, arid places to test their charges, because surviving in these environments was supremely challenging.
She knew deserts might look empty to the untrained eye, but if you knew where to look, there was usually evidence of life, but here there was nothing. What she saw outside was exactly what she had expected to find on Mars.
Bert suggested she used the autopilot on the return journey to the settlement. She was grateful for this because she was physically and emotionally drained and was ready to pull over and have a snooze otherwise. Later, she would think to ask why they had to return at all if she could travel anywhere in the galaxy by wormhole. The reason was a mundane one: the rover was a key prop in the fiction of the settlement and was required back at the base.
While she rested, she thought about sharing her new insights with the rest of the colonists, if she could get their attention.
We want to discuss this with you, Bert interrupted her thoughts. He had been quiet for some time, and Janice half hoped he had gone for good. We have a plan to get you off planet when we return to the settlement.
“Won’t they be worried about me?” Janice asked.
With a pang of resentment, she realised she was really asking whether Robert would be missing her. He had become oblivious to their relationship and in recent times had ceased to even acknowledge she existed. He had joined the rest of the crew in a weird new age communal and sexual family arrangement which had developed over the last few weeks, and a group she was excluded from. She wasn’t comfortable with this kind of behaviour, but it would have be
en nice to have been able to say 'no thanks' and not simply be quietly shunned.
Being so driven, she had been something of an outsider all her life and was used to being alone. What did worry her now was being out here all by herself with nobody to talk to, except a voice in her head called Bert.
“I need to tell them they are really on Mars.”
Do you think they really care?
A thought struck her. “Did you do something to them?” Janice wondered if Bert had used sedatives to keep them all quiet and put a stop to any escape attempt.
I may have encouraged certain behaviours, Bert replied. For all the right reasons. It is in the best interests of my masters, the Skidian first people, to keep you all alive and in an optimal state of mental and physical condition. He hoped she’d be happy with this explanation. The actual way it controlled the offworlders was more akin to direct mind control using nodes the medichines activated, and this worked for most newSkidians except for a few outliers like Janice and Bruce.
Janice was suspicious of Bert’s motives and those of these Skidians or the planetary system it represented. The more Bert attempted to set her at ease, the more apprehensive she felt.
We want you to be involved in preparing the tens of thousands of your fellow offworlders who will soon be arriving on our planet. Many of them will come from the MFY facility in Australia but others will come from the Middle East and North Africa. Some are currently sitting in camps on the European mainland, or aboard vessels travelling across your Mediterranean Sea. Many thousands of them will join the MFYers on their journey. We want you to help us prepare the way for these people while we re-populate the planet.
“How can I help?” Janice asked. This situation was becoming more surreal with each passing moment. “I know nothing about your home planet or your real intentions. For all I know, you might want to harvest our organs.” It was testament to how far she had come that she didn’t reject what Bert was saying out of hand, no matter how improbable it sounded.
It’s not like that at all!
She sat in the rover listening to Bert ramble on, as the vehicle piloted itself in the direction of the colony settlement. It confirmed how improbable the MFY program had been. If she had been told two years ago that she was going to be heading for Mars on a rocket built by a Reality TV production company, she would have thought it was a great joke and laughed it off.
Janice wondered how many other MFY team members were like herself, their lifelong dreams snatched away from them. How many had endured similar challenges in their lives and were equally vulnerable to exploitation? The MFY program had searched them out, preying on their emotional state, filling the void left by shattered dreams.
“I’d like to say goodbye...” she started, and then replayed the conversations she and Bert had been conducting on the trip. “Why didn’t we realise this place called Skid was our ultimate destination?”
You weren’t supposed to.
Janice watched the Mars-scape roll by in silence until the lights of the settlement came into view. The return journey was a lot quicker than the outbound one.
You travelled in a great arc. Bert showed the course they had taken on the cab’s navigation display.
“OK,” she said at last. “Remind me what you want me to do again?”
We are going to dispatch you to Skid, where you will join up with a few other like-minded people and assist in developing a program to provide the tools for those who will follow you and integrate into Skidian society. The main task will be to create a user guide. We will load the user guide into an application for everyone to use when they interface with the infrastructure of Skid. This interface is for all intents and purposes.. me.
“Write a bloody manual? I’ve had enough of manuals to last me a lifetime!” Janice exclaimed.
It is essential we provide the right tools for people, so they can live successfully on Skid and lead full lives.
Bert was struggling to articulate the requirement. The Transcendents had convinced themselves all the fleshies they hoovered up would immediately adapt to life on Skid without any preparation. Their simplistic reasoning was the fleshies would deal with the situation the way their forbears had: they’d adapt because they would have to. They also saw the development of a user guide as a further delay and a risk to the replenishment program.
However, Bruce had been insistent about the user guide, and because his cooperation was essential, the Transcendents were unable to force the issue. He was adamant you couldn’t simply hoover up people from various parts of the world and mix them all together and expect them to live happily ever after.
Bruce also believed they should introduce the remaining Skidians to the idea they were about to be swamped by tens of thousands of new immigrants. But he could only do so much. Lake knew something was up, but not what it entailed.
Bruce and the Transcendents had agreed on one thing. Janice, Morris, Zarif and a handful of others would be more usefully employed on Skid, which also meant they couldn't create mischief on Mars, on Automedon, or in the main MFY facility in Australia.
The user guide will provide the essential information for your people to live on Skid. It will contain instructions on how to access food and shelter, how to travel from one part of the planet to another and how to interact with the indigenous culture. The remnant Skidians could hardly be called indigenous, but they would feel they had some rights over the newcomers and would fight preserve their way of life from the sheer weight of numbers heading their way.
“OK, I think I get it,” Janice replied. She could see the merit in an operating manual. She just wasn’t convinced she was the right person for the job. She had been assigned to documentation roles in the past and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. Writing processes and manuals was as boring as bat shit. But then so was life confined to a Martian colony settlement, controlled by an AI, surrounded by fellow crew members who didn’t seem to know she existed.
“OK,” she repeated, “I’ll do it.”
Is there anything back at the base you require?
The question shook Janice a little. “Do you mean I'm going now? This minute?” Yes. You won’t be required at the colony settlement any longer.
Janice was silent for a few minutes. The rover rolled on towards the settlement which was quickly resolving into a cluster of structures. Everything was happening a little bit faster than she had anticipated.
“I need a few items from my personal locker, and my tablet.” There was no point in saying goodbye to anyone.
Very well. Bert sent a signal to Skid and opened a wormhole entrance into the cab of the rover. Before Janice had a chance to say anything more, let alone have second thoughts, she was picking herself up off the ground where she had been unceremoniously dumped on her backside, still wearing the space suit.
Presumably this was Skid, the only thing she was sure of was she was standing in a paddock, a field maybe in the middle of nowhere. The contrast with Mars couldn’t be greater.
In the distance, she glimpsed the outline of a built-up area and for want of any better idea started walking in that general direction. She took a few steps and immediately discovered the spacesuit wasn’t designed for comfortable locomotion in standard gravity environments, and she was finding it claustrophobic in a way she hadn’t on Mars.
To remove the suit, press the dimples on the chin of the helmet, Bert reminded her, or speak the command ‘Deactivate suit’. Once it has fully retracted, you will be able to remove the helmet.
Janice followed the instructions and the suit flowed off her body, and rolled itself up like a blanket, still attached to the helmet. In a few seconds she was standing barefoot in the grass, dressed in her MFY overalls. She reached up and lifted the helmet off, pushed the suit fully into it, then tucked the helmet under her arm in case she needed it again.
The smell of freshly mown grass filled her nostrils. She could see pieces of cut grass had stuck to her feet and legs.
“It’s
like a big lawn,” she said out loud. But there was no response.
Before she had gone more than a few paces she saw a small truck coming her way. She wasn’t sure what to do next. Her first thought was to run, and her heart started to thump in her chest. Her next thought was that here was nowhere to go, and she wouldn’t be able to outpace the truck bouncing across the field towards her.
Don’t be concerned, Bert said trying to soothe her.
“Don’t be concerned? You’ve dumped me on an alien planet and the aliens are coming to get me. What am I supposed to do?”
Before Bert had a chance to respond, the truck drew up alongside her. A vaguely familiar figure poked his head out of the window.
“Hi Janice!” said Morris Thwaites. “Fancy seeing you here.”
Twenty-Two
Do you really want to find out where you are? Are you sure?
Zarif was so startled he almost lost his balance, spilling more coffee over his pants.
“Did you hear that?” Zarif asked Mahmoud. He wasn’t sure why Mahmoud had chosen to seek counsel from him. They both came from the same village but had had little to do with each other in the past. Mahmoud used to run the small village café and liked to think he kept his finger on the pulse. In the days before the madness had descended on the village, the café had been the focal point of the community. This was where Zarif’s father liked to hang out and smoke using the hookah, and have whiskey splashed in his coffee.
He can’t hear me. If you keep asking him questions out loud you’ll spook him, and I’m not sure how he’ll respond. At the very least, you may find everyone will be wary of you and no longer interact with you. Just say you’re sorry.
Zarif made eye contact with the older man and saw his expression change.
Mahmoud had sought out Zarif because he was looking for a familiar face he could trust to discuss a sensitive and perplexing matter. Now Zarif sounded like he had been possessed by the devil.
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