Stig wasn’t sure what to believe. He thought Bill was off his rocker, but he didn’t have a better, more plausible explanation to offer. There were many anomalies he was struggling to explain. Chief among them was how they had got here without any recollection of the journey.
“Let’s look for a way out.” he suggested and rose from the couch. When they entered the dormitory area, he saw a few other people had started to fan out towards them, giving the robots a wide berth while they continued toward the end of the dormitory.
Another set of robots caught his eye. These were dropping items methodically onto all the beds. Intrigued, Stig walked over to the nearest bed and picked up one of the objects. It looked very much like a cross between a tablet and a phone. It fired up immediately and asked for his mobile password. Stig scratched his head and entered the password and watched with astonishment as the screen started to fill up with the apps he recognised from his phone.
A welcome message popped up.
Good morning Stig, how can I help you today?
Stig’s first thought had been to drop the device, but he quickly considered his options.
“Where are we?”
I am not at liberty to say. You will be advised shortly.
Stig watched the robots move down the rows of bunks depositing tablets onto each bed and then spinning around in one fluid movement, almost too fast for the eye to see, to replenish from the conveyors extending through the floor in their wake. Then, without any warning the supply of tablets dried up and the robots froze. Stig got the impression their programming hadn't prepared them for a supply problem.
After a few moments, the conveyor retracted, and the floor closed behind it.
“I’m not sure I believe what I just saw,” Bill observed. Before he could add anything else, the robots came alive again, and retreated to the end of the building, disappearing through the flaps and into service tunnels.
“Me neither,” Stig replied. He struggled to process what he had seen, the robots disappearing like cats through a cat flap.
Thirty-Two
Bruce loaded up the runabout while Ngaio tended to the last bit of tidying up in the bach, making sure they didn’t leave behind any left-over food that might go off. He had an idea it might be a while before they were able to return since he had given the Transcendents an undertaking he would take an active role in the implementation phase of the upload process. This meant he wasn’t going to have much time on the farm over the next few months either. But, Ngaio had convinced him Myfair would be able to deal with any day to day issues which might crop up, and the old man and Rangi would be around most of the time if he got stuck.
Once he had finished loading, Bruce pulled his mobile out of the cubby hole where he had stashed it for the duration of their stay and switched it on. He had left it on the boat when they arrived, so he wouldn't be tempted to play with it. Service at the bach was patchy at best anyway, and he had also resisted the temptation to turn it on when they went out in the harbour fishing, where there was a decent connection.
Bruce had promised Ngaio a clean break for a few days, and this is what she got. If anyone had really needed to get hold of him, the Transcendents would have patched them through, and the locals knew where he was if there was an emergency.
He had wondered if he would be able to cope without instant access to the world and what was going on. However, in the end it hadn’t been difficult to turn it off at all.
Everyone respected their need for some space and quiet time, even the Transcendents. Quite a feat, given it was normally impossible for it to shut up for any length of time. It had ceased, if only temporarily, the endless, mindless commentary it kept up on every conceivable subject, and the constant demand to go faster, and deliver the promised bodies to Skid sooner rather than later.
“What are you going to do with yourself when this is all over?” Ngaio asked, as Bruce walked into the bach to help with the last of the bags and the rubbish.
“I'm not sure.”
“I thought you had decided you were going to stick with the farm for a while? There’s quite a bit of work to do to integrate the two properties.”
“Yeah.” Bruce grabbed a big plastic bag filled with rubbish. “There is, but once it’s all done and dusted, then what?” He hadn’t really broached the subject with Ngaio, but he didn’t think they would manage to complete the integration while their fathers were living on their respective blocks of land. “We can go off and do anything we want, and when I say anything, I mean anything.” If the Transcendents were to be trusted, and Bruce had no reason to doubt it, he’d have a space ship at his disposal with the capacity to take him anywhere in the known universe he wanted to go.
“That’s all very well Bruce, but you need some purpose in life, you can’t just drift. You’ll go mad otherwise. There’s one last rubbish bag outside by the back door,” Ngaio told him, changing tack, “and then we will be good to go.”
Bruce wandered around the side of the house, collected the bag, and dumped it in the stern of the runabout.
“That’s it,” Ngaio called. She stood at the front entrance, took one last look around then closed the door.
Ngaio tossed a bag of clothes into the boat, climbed aboard, and sat while Bruce walked around the bow, calf-deep in water. He reached over and slipped the mooring line over the cleat in the middle of the foredeck, then made his way back to the stern, sliding his hand down the combing on the edge of the deck until he was standing beside the outboard. He put one foot inside the transom, gave the boat a good shove forward with his other foot, propelling it out into deeper water, and then clambered aboard.
When he judged the water was deep enough, he lowered the outboard, and then moved forward to the steering wheel and pressed the start button.
The engine started at the first jab, and he let it idle for few moments before engaging gear and the boat nudged slowly forward out of the bay. Bruce glanced over his shoulder and took one last fond look at the bach.
“I really love it here, you know,” he said to Ngaio as his mobile started to beep, ring, and vibrate. The coverage improved as they moved further from the beach, and he could see message notifications popping up. Ngaio was busily scrolling through her own messages. He decided his could wait and pushed the throttle forward, so the boat picked up speed and began to plane.
Simultaneously, icons in his vision associated with communicating with the Transcendents began to glow so Bruce knew it was online and ready to start a dialogue. He recognised the vague sense of static on the line he always associated with an open channel to the Transcendents, but they remained mute, an unusual event in his experience. Despite the silence, he still had the sense, an impression he couldn’t shake, that some other entity was listening in to all their conversations, like a spy wiretapping a phone line or sifting through a feed of digital data.
They met choppier water once they left the shelter of the bay and were into the harbour proper. Ngaio reached over and tapped him on the shoulder. “Look at this,” she mouthed, over the sound of the outboard and the waves slapping against the hull. She pointed to her mobile screen.
“What do you mean?” Bruce asked, tapping the throttle back a bit, so he could hear Ngaio clearly.
“Looks like something has happened while we have been away.”
“What do you mean, something has happened?” He demanded and pulled the throttle backwards abruptly, so the runabout virtually stopped dead in the water and they both had to grab the windscreen to stop being thrown over the bow.
Bruce picked up his mobile, leaving enough way on to keep idling forward. He scrolled through his own messages. General Smith, Wisneski, Dick Todd, and Shelly Shaw had sent him multiple messages asking him what was going on, demanding to know why the MFY upload and refugee download process had been initiated ahead of schedule without consultation with the various stakeholders.
They were mostly annoyed there had been no communication. An entire narrative had been
developed to explain the sudden disappearance of thousands of refugees from camps through Europe and from ships at sea around Mediterranean.
Messaging was being developed to explain the disappearance of the entire population of the MFY compound in South Australia. The details were still being worked through and were designed to stop a mad panic once the campus was found to be empty. Simultaneously as a feint, Bruce had planned an announcement by Chump that the United States government would be providing huge grants to the region, a re-invigorated foreign policy plan to encourage the nations of North Africa and the Middle East to set aside their differences and focus on economic development. The emphasis would be on providing clean water supplies, decent health care, and education for all, without any of the usual ideological strings attached. Well, that’s what the plan had been when he and Ngaio had left for a few days’ rest and recreation.
“The useless bastards.” Bruce muttered under his breath. A year or so ago he would have thrown a big wobbly and thrown all his toys out of the cot. However, Ngaio had had a moderating effect on his behaviour so now he considered his options relatively calmly.
“What do you think has happened?”
“I’m buggered if I know.” Bruce sensed the Transcendents were waiting to see how he would respond before it said anything, but he wasn’t sure he was going to give it the satisfaction. More calmly than he thought possible, he said “Let's go home and regroup. Can you let the others know we’ll be home in an hour or so and we can jump on a video call to talk about it? The damage is done so I don’t know what discussing it will achieve. Famous last words, I know, but it’s not as if we’ll ever have to do this again so there isn’t much point in a major inquest into what went wrong.” By now, the refugees and MFYers were either already on Skid or on their way, perhaps still transiting through Automedon, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Bruce felt like washing his hands of the whole scheme. He’d supported the Transcendents. He’d championed the least disruptive path to try and achieve their requirements: the decision to upload only those who were seeking a better life or had signed up to travel to Mars. It had felt like an excellent idea at the time to create an outpost for humanity on another planet, to reduce the risk of a cataclysmic event wiping out the entire human race. Now he wasn’t so sure it had been the right thing to do.
He tried to contain himself, but he was so pissed off with the Transcendents he just wanted to smash something. Before he realised what he was doing, he slammed the throttle forward abruptly in frustration. Ngaio had to grab the top of the windscreen to stop herself from flying backwards into the cockpit.
She gave Bruce a dirty look, but he was too preoccupied with his own thoughts to notice and had forgotten she was even with him. He didn’t even think to say sorry.
Why had the Transcendents gone ahead with the entire upload process? They were almost ready to go ahead as planned, so it made no sense.
“Bastard!” he muttered under his breath, then did his best to calm down, and think the situation through without burdening himself with a sense of personal failure.
“What does this mean?” Ngaio asked.
“Not sure, to be honest,” he replied, starting to think things through logically. “On one hand I’m gutted the Transcendents decided to implement while we were putting the finishing touches to our communications plan and guide Book, because that wasn’t what we agreed.” He paused to catch his breath and tamp down his growing outrage. “We thought we should warm up the press, give an explanation for what is going on and smooth the way to make sure the wider public don’t get too agitated. General Smith has the contacts to make this happen, and that ball is already rolling. It’s all just propaganda, however you dress it up. On the other hand, we’re much better than eighty percent there in terms of preparedness so it’s not really the end of the world if a whole lot of people have ended up there on Skid without being fully organised. There’s no way most of them could ever be fully informed anyway.”
Ngaio thought Bruce was talking as if Skid was just overhead, and most people would welcome the opportunity to live there. He ignored the fact Skid was an unknown planet, light years away across the other side of the galaxy. Of all people, he should have understood what it would mean to find yourself on an alien planet far from home, and how difficult it would be for most people to adapt when they discovered there was no option to return home. Then there would be the impact for the truly religious among them when they discovered the foundations of their faith were based on the influence of previous interactions with the Skidians, who had been mistaken in the past for gods and their emissaries. Mind you, she thought to herself, a lot of these people wouldn’t be swayed from their beliefs whatever evidence they were given.
Despite his intention to be philosophic about the intervention of the Transcendents, who remained silent, Bruce couldn’t control the anger welling up inside, and the sense of betrayal he felt, after all he had done for them.
“You know what?” Bruce asked. “I’m tempted to turn around and go back to the bach, forget about the whole thing, and leave the fuckers to their own devices.”
Ngaio smiled to herself. She knew that wasn’t going to happen. Despite what he might say and might be thinking, he felt a high degree of responsibility for Skid and all its people. There would be a bit of a cooling off period before he started to get involved in Skidian affairs again, but he would make contact and ease himself back into his role sooner rather than later.
Part Two
One
How are you this morning Bruce?
The Transcendents asked with a tentativeness that suggested an emotional organic being. To Bruce, they didn’t sound like creatures of the cloud running on a server, deep in the bowels of Skid, or a data construct stored between the stars.
He ignored them, the same way he had ignored their increasingly desperate entreaties every day for the last few weeks, ever since they had decided to pre-empt their carefully scoped upload plan to initiate the re-population of Skid with tens of thousands of humans.
As the days passed, he was finding it more taxing to ignore the Transcendents than he had expected. He had always thought regular contact with the aliens would cease once the upload process was completed. He had also believed Automedon would have been steered off into space or blown to bits before human space agencies managed to mount a mission to explore it by now.
Neither of these events had happened: the Transcendents continued the daily ritual of enquiring after his health, and it had become a daily ritual for Bruce to ignore them, while he enjoyed his morning coffee and a cigarette.
General Smith and his team must be providing guidance to Chump according to their original plans, and most probably now had their own link to the Transcendents, or at least the MPU. The Transcendents were quite needy and would always require some sort positive reinforcement. He also expected they would have decided how the mission should proceed by now and how much ongoing support the newSkidians required, without any input from him.
Bruce had also refused to communicate with the General or any of the other key MFY team members since he had spat the dummy, so he had no idea how their plans were shaping up, and he pretended he didn’t care. This pretence was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain with each passing day.
The General and the Todd brothers had initially tried to contact him now and again, but they no longer bothered him. He had even ignored Sue when she wanted to explore visitation rights with their son. Ngaio had dealt with Sue, and Little Bruce disappeared for a few days at a time once every week or so. Initially Bruce had thought Little Bruce was just spending more time with his grandparents, but this wasn’t always the case. Bruce had spied Sue skulking about the farm, but she kept well out of his way when she arrived to visit the boy. Sue was still on good terms with his mother and often visited her.
He’d answer the Transcendents one day soon, perhaps. The Transcendents knew it, Ngaio knew it, the General knew it, e
veryone who had been associated with the MFY implementation program at the highest level knew it. It was just a matter of time, but they left him to vent. Unbeknown to him, the entire program was in a kind of limbo while everyone waited for him to return. This didn’t impact on the day to day welfare of the newSkidians, but now nobody was sure how to proceed and the bulk of MFYers still hadn’t been uploaded to Skid: they existed in a form of suspended animation on the asteroid.
Bruce was a little surprised the connection to the Transcendents remained open and he could still sense the presence of the other entity lurking in the background. Bruce still had full access to any part of the formidable Skidian technological infrastructure he chose to utilise, which was very useful at times. Having access to a space ship and a wormhole was bloody handy when you wanted to get away from it all.
When he was in a reflective mood, Bruce wondered why he continued to be so bloody minded when everyone around him, including the entire population of the planet, had moved on and the complete disappearance of tens of thousands of people from the MFY campus and refugee centres now hardly rated a mention anywhere in the news, even though there had been no explanation for them vanishing without trace.
The latest theory doing the rounds to explain how so many refugees could vanish at the same time was that they had simply slipped away into migrant communities across Europe, or they had returned to their homelands to take advantage of the rapid economic development underway across these areas, largely thanks to President Chump’s generous foreign aid policies. The alleged return of law and order to previously lawless lands had created security for people and provided the stability for economies to thrive.
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