The Colonists

by Keith Fenwick

  His brother and his girlfriend insisted they needed more help to produce the user guide for newcomers to Skid they’d been tasked with completing. They’d begun but were a long way from completing it.

  There’d already been one new arrival today, one of the Martian colonists. The last one he had been told to expect, before the deluge arrived and the program ramped up to full speed. But bugger it, here was another one, and just after he’d settled down to relax with a few beers to watch some Super Rugby on the telly.

  Trev knew Bruce had lobbied to make sure they had all their ducks in a row before they pulled the trigger on the mass migration plan. However, it was clear to Trev it wouldn’t be long before the upload process, as they euphemistically called it, would be transformed from the current trickle of arrivals to a deluge.

  The MPU, or one of its subroutines, had probably decided it couldn’t deal with this new guy. Couldn't get its message across, or simply lost patience in a very un-computerlike fashion and decided to fire the unfortunate soul off to Skid and have Trev deal with it.

  The new arrival’s details flashed up on a heads-up display in Trev’s vision. He had no idea how this worked, but it was bloody handy. He quickly assessed the man’s details and decided the guy would be an interesting addition to the growing community at The Farm, given his background and religion. Currently, Trev was keeping an eye on some indoSkidians, several technicians from the MFY campus, the loopy old ex- President of the United States, and a new arrival from the first Martian colony.

  While he waited for the small truck to come alongside, Zarif tried make sense of this sudden change of scenery. He’d didn’t know what to make of the grass. He knew what grass was, of course, but he had never seen so much of it, so much luxurious greenness stretching away as far as the eye could see. He never would have believed there was this much grass in the entire world. It was a sight far removed from the desert fringe where he had lived all his life.

  He wasn’t sure how to react. On one hand, he dearly wanted to roll around in the grass and savour the sweet smell and the luxurious look and feel of it. On the other, he was furiously attempting to process the situation. The shocks to his system had come thick and fast in a very short time and he was still coming to grips with it all. He still believed he was somewhere in Europe, some very remote part of the European mainland, because apart from the buildings he could see on the horizon, and the vehicle approaching him, there was nothing else to see except for the sea of grass.

  The vehicle approaching gave him some cause for concern. It looked like the small trucks used by the warlords back home, driven by thugs roaming the countryside, terrorising the people of his village with machine guns or light cannons mounted on the rear decks. Zarif breathed a sigh of relief when he couldn't see a gun, though the people in the cab might still be armed and have itchy trigger fingers. But he did relax a little.

  When the truck pulled up alongside, he was relieved when a European popped his head out of the window.

  “Hi mate, jump in the back and I'll take you home.”

  Home? What home? The man was speaking some form of English. Zarif considered himself a fluent English speaker, but he was having trouble understanding the man’s guttural accent, so he wasn’t completely sure what was being said.

  “Home?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, my home.”

  This is Trev, Bert informed him. If you say, 'Thank you, Trev' and climb into the back of the truck, you will confuse him and put him on the back foot. It might be fun, Bert added.

  “OK. Thank you, Trev,” Zarif replied, and saw the look of surprise on the man’s face. “I’ll look forward to that,” he ad-libbed.

  “Nobody likes a smartarse, mate.” Trev jerked his thumb at the back of the truck. “Jump in.”

  Zarif tossed his bag in the back of the truck, clambered over the side after it and sat on one of the wheel arches. The door on the far side of the cab opened, and a young woman in uniform emerged.

  “Hi, I think I’ll join you,” she said, closing the door, and clambering over the side of the truck’s rear deck and standing behind the roof of the cab.

  “I don’t think sitting there will be very comfortable once we get going,” Janice observed. “Stand up here and hold onto this bar. By the way, what’s your name? I’m Janice.” Janice held out her hand for Zarif to shake.

  Zarif stared at her. He wasn’t used to a woman being so direct. He knew things were different in the west, but this was going to take a bit of getting used to. He considered himself to be enlightened in his approach to dealing with women on equal terms. But a woman telling him what to do - he wasn’t sure he was ready for that!

  “It’s all a bit much to come to grips with straight off, isn’t it?” Janice continued. “In some ways I am still pretty pissed with the MFY organisation for lying to me about where we were really going, but it’s kind of exciting actually being here.”

  Zarif couldn’t stop looking at Janice. She looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn't pinpoint where he had seen her before.

  “Where are you from? What part of the MFY program were you working on?”

  “I don’t understand, what is the MFY program you are referring to?” Zarif asked in his very best English. Despite his views on how woman should behave and dress, he was intoxicated by her very presence. She had an exotic look which was very attractive to him. The women in his life usually wore some form of traditional dress, hiding the shape of their bodies and faces.

  “You’re from the Mars for You program, aren’t you?” Janice asked, pointing to the emblem on the sleeve of her overalls.

  “Ah!” Zarif recognised her now. Janice was one of the first colonists on Mars, part of the Martian Reality Show. He, and just about everyone he knew, had either subscribed to the show at one time or another, or streamed free feeds of the key moments of the mission. “But..” His voice trailed away. “Shouldn’t you be on Mars?”

  “Correct. Long story short, I’m here on Skid, the name of this planet by the way, however unlikely it sounds, for the same reason you are. We have been tasked with writing a manual, a good practice guide to living on Skid, for all the settlers who will soon come here.”

  Zarif’s heart went into overdrive. Bert configured the medichines circulating in Zarif’s bloodstream to calm him down.

  “I’m not from the MFY program. My name is Zarif Khan.”

  “If you’re not from the MFY program, then where are you from and why are you here?”

  Our friend Zarif is under a bit of stress with this situation, and he is likely to be in this state for a while. You and Morris have had longer to prepare yourself.

  Janice wasn’t so sure of this. Discovering there were real aliens was one thing: starting to interact with them, or one of their agents, and being whisked away to their planet was something else again.

  “How did you get here?” Janice repeated, which was a bit of a silly question, because Zarif had no idea. But after a brief hesitation, Zarif was happy to find someone to talk to and spent a few minutes explaining his experiences of the past few days, starting from when he had boarded the trawler in North Africa and ending with a landing on what he still believed was somewhere in Europe. He heard himself describing events in detail with a calmness he didn’t necessarily feel.

  “That’s quite a story,” Janice said, patting Zarif on the arm to offer him some comfort.

  Before he could stop himself, Zarif recoiled from her touch and immediately regretted it. This woman was the most exquisite creature he had ever seen in the flesh, one who was taking an interest in him, and here he was pushing her away.

  He didn’t have an opportunity to say anything else, as they crested the summit of a small hill. Janice gripped his forearm tightly and with her free hand pointed over the roof of the truck at the small settlement coming into view.

  “This is our new home.”

  He was a little confused at what he saw. This didn’t look like a refugee camp or detention centre.
For someone from a tiny dusty village in a war-torn country, it was almost a vision of paradise. Maybe things wouldn’t be so bad here after all, he decided with a burst of optimism.

  Twenty-Four

  “We must do something to reduce the number of immigrants arriving on Skid. Soon, they will be here in such numbers it will impact on the resources that are rightfully ours.” Senator Niur, the representative for Didenud had been droning on in a similar vein for some time, and Lake had largely tuned him out.

  The resources available to Skid were vast. Lake knew for practical purposes they were infinite. Niur was over-reacting as usual: the number of new arrivals from the offworld currently could almost be counted on the fingers of two hands. Nuir had also glossed over the fact that the city he represented, once teeming with Skidians, was now almost devoid of life. Once the population of Skid had numbered in the hundreds of millions. Now there were only a few thousand Skidians dotted about the planet, but the resources and manufacturing capability of the Skidian economy were still geared to support the pre-disaster population. These resources, though not infinite, would last as long as there were asteroids to mine in the galaxy.

  One of the many facts the senator was unaware of were the hundreds, if not thousands, of mineral globes, of smelted asteroid ore, bobbing in the great salty water. Eventually, these would be inducted via a vast conveyor system to one of a multitude of manufacturing plants, to be used to support some part of the vast enterprise of Skid. There was sufficient raw material already on the planet to keep the manufactories running for decades at the current level of production and they kept on arriving on a pre-arranged schedule.

  This vast store of consumables had built up since the great die-off, which had all but wiped out the Skidian population. The complex infrastructure managing the process of mining asteroids, refining the ores and chemicals, and then boosting them towards Skid had continued unabated through this crisis. It was easy enough to dial mining activity down and stockpile products until demand increased again. It was a much more complicated process to stop the entire supply chain, and then start it up again later, so the globes had kept coming.

  Lake was in favour of more immigrants because he believed new blood, and more importantly new ideas, had to be injected into the gene pool for the Skidian population to survive, something Niur would never understand. There was no going back to the good old days, which on reflection weren’t so good anyway. The likes of Senator Niur hankered after the pre-die-off days of unlimited Stim events, when Skid had been the most advanced civilisation in the universe, a place where offworlders didn’t turn up at the oddest places and times, asking all manner of stupid questions, pretending they owned the place.

  Niur held a rather romantic, nostalgic, view of the past now they had a degree of self-determination. This hadn’t been the case historically. Skid in all its glory had been a rather repressive regime, one that didn’t stand for any form of non-conformity. A regime where every stage of their lives had been mapped out and monitored, despite the indoSkidian belief that they were in control of their own destiny. If nothing else, the great die-off, tragedy that it was, had brought about an irreversible disrupt to the Skidian Way, and provided the conditions for Niur to stand on his chair, and have his say without fear of recrimination.

  “We should round up these newcomers and send them back where they come from. We don’t need them. Skid for Skidians, I say!”

  “Hear, hear!” The small group of Senators were able to agree on this point, which was unusual. They spent most of their time bickering over obscure points of order and obsolete, arcane customs they thought should be re-introduced to the governing process, things they had read about in the archives, or simply dreamed up.

  These clowns thought they were the indigenous population, responsible for creating the most technologically advanced and sophisticated society in the known universe. It would come as a rude shock if they discovered the truth of their origins, and then they would really have something to whinge and moan about. None of the them had noticed that they closely resembled newSkidians or offworlders.

  The modern indoSkidian population, all but obliterated by the actions of a mindless, thoughtless artificial intelligence devoid of any common sense, was the product of waves of forced migration, of which there was no historical memory. They were all the descendants of immigrants, they weren’t the indigenous people of the planet at all.

  Lake hadn’t shared this knowledge with anyone, because it would devastate the surviving indoSkidians. The senators had no time to listen to anyone who didn’t march to the beat of their drum or had an opinion divergent from their staunch view of the world. If they discovered the truth, no doubt they would find many creative ways to completely avoid acknowledging it, but Lake was convinced it would be a different story for the wider population.

  The few indoSkidians who had taken up Lake's offer to become senators - there was enough space in the senate to house all the remaining indoSkidians if they chose to engage - would rather listen to one of their narrow minded self-styled spokesmen than listen to any form of reason. Lake knew these indoSkidians had created a fantasy narrative to explain the events of the recent past and the failure of Skidian capability and believed: if they repeated the lie often and loudly enough, the fantasy would become reality. They thought they could, by some sleight of hand, make the world what their dim memories made of it, a world previously governed by an impotent senate, and an equally toothless Chief Mati. A world controlled by an artificial intelligence prone to massive processing glitches and missteps.

  The recent die-off hadn’t been the first calamity to impact on the Skidian population, though Lake hoped it was the last. There. He could say it now without fear of retribution.

  He also now knew the attempted invasion by Eduid at the head of a Celcion mercenary force was linked with the die-off but wasn’t completely sure what the connection was. One thing was apparent: the MPU had failed them when it was most needed.

  All this and more was clear to him now that the Transcendents had made contact and set him straight on a few matters. It had now been revealed to Lake why his own plan for re-populating the planet had failed to get off the ground. If Senator Niur and his followers believed the mere handful of offworlders who had arrived so far were too many, then they were be in for a rude shock.

  Lake wanted to stand up and shout at them and tell them their speeches and posturing were all for nothing. They had never been truly in control of their destiny, and never would be. Oh, there would be some concessions by the Transcendents, but once the new migrants to Skid settled in they would also want to have a say in the governing of the planet, followed by a desire for autonomy. There would be little the indoSkidians could do, because the vast numbers of newSkidians on their way would simply swamp them.

  Lake wasn’t keen on this vision of the future for Skid once it had been explained to him, and he had been determined to relinquish his post of Chief Mati. The Transcendents had refused to listen or accept Lake’s resignation, and Lake had retaliated by refusing to attend the senate. This completely bamboozled the senators who didn’t know how to proceed if the Chief Mati wasn’t in attendance.

  It was Bruce on one of his random visits who persuaded Lake to stay on and pressured him to provide some stability in the period of rapid change being inflicted on his people.

  “I’ll look after you mate. It’s going to be a tricky time once all the newSkidians are uploaded,” Bruce had said to him while Lake was bouncing Little Bruce on his knee and fending off one of Bruce's dogs, which was trying to slobber all over him.

  President Ronald D Chump gazed into the mirror, shaking his impressive mane from one side to the other, practising his trademark smirk. It was important for him to get his expression just right, and this took an awful lot of practise. Chump tilted his head backwards and thrust his jaw forwards in a vain attempt to hide his double chin. This was his triumphant expression, the one he employed in front of the crowds of supporte
rs he whipped into a frenzy, telling one lie after another. It was the exultant look he used to encourage his supporters to join him in the fantasy world he had created where they would all be great again, which as he kept on telling his supporters, was their God-given right.

  These days the expression staring back at him was more like a grimace. His audiences were now mostly hostile to him, protesting his policy back-flips and the perception that far from becoming great again, America was becoming an irrelevance, a bit player in world affairs. But this didn’t prevent him from keeping up his practise.

  He was tempted to run a hand through what was left of his wonderful, manly head of hair, much like he had when he was a younger man. However, this would have destroyed thirty minutes of his stylist’s work, engineered to cover his large bald spots with a thinning fringe, and he was fronting a news conference in a few minutes.

  General Smith insisted he undertake regular news conferences and get in front of the crowds and camera more often. Up until recently, he’d loved the rallies and thrived on the adulation he had received. Now they were a trial for him, and he wasn’t keen to continue with them. He’d always detested press conferences and avoided them like the plague because he didn’t like the clever reporters who exposed his lack of knowledge of the subjects he professed to be an expert in.

  But the General had explained that Chump had no option. Because of Chump's increasingly rare public appearances, people were starting wonder if he had gone missing in action like his predecessor, the late President Mitchell. To refute this, he had to endure press conferences and rallies, deal with tricky questions and the contempt of the conservative media and the crowds who had once worshipped him as their messiah.