Excolopolis_Poles of Enforcement

by Jack L. Marsch

  “Those upon whom you rained your fire, did you heed their pleading? Did you give them a chance?” The robot roared with such intensity that plaster fell from the ceiling and dropped down upon the stricken president.

  At the sound of the inhuman voice, the president went numb with shock, his mouth working like a stunned fish. The SRT unit stopped in front of him and watched the barely conscious man. Something flashed across the robot's visual receptor, as if manifesting signs of innate intelligence, yet it was otherwise.

  Steersman, controlling the robot from his office in Europe, had seen everything that his robot had seen. His words were being conveyed in the robots artificial voice. Back in his office, Steersman's face was lined with anxiety and the immense strain he had been under, but the tension abated and the lines smoothed away.

  “We have cleansed the city. The enforcement pole platform is moving out!” The sound of Murinko's voice echoed out of the speakers. Steersman instructed the robot to turn around and watched as the dour commander made his way closer in the Chinese President's state room.

  “All right. Take Zhiqiang Gao to Brussels. He will have to answer to an international criminal court,” said Steersman in the office. “He is their problem now!” rang out the robot voice.

  Murinko looked into the face of the machine, and even he felt a chill at hearing the piercing artificial voice relaying Steersman's words.

  “Copy that. We'll be ready to go as soon as we've ensured order in the city. The upheaval has been pretty huge,” he said, and was lifted up into the command ship by gravitational radius.

  ***

  Chapter 18

  Truth

  In 2080, on a sunny April morning which, as usual of late, had warmed up rather early. Students all carried cold drinks against the ruthless heat in PrEUST park, the young scholars occupied the cool islands of shadow alongside the lake, that gave them relief from the heat wave. The odd gust of wind sprayed a mist of water droplets from the fountain across lucky ones every now and again.

  The number of university students in the third year had dramatically decreased with less than twenty thousand people remaining. Many of those who had simply not taken the expectations of their lecturers seriously, after being expelled, applied for the entrance examinations again, trying to start over. The university's popularity had grown along with its educational value, and the demand for a PrEUST education rose each day in just the same way as the demand for equities on the stock market rose with positive market perception of a company.

  PrEUST did not deal with different types of degrees; there was only one, meaning that ASEC recognized that a successful PrEUST graduate's academic credentials made them the world's most accomplished specialists. What was even more significant was that major research companies from all over the globe sent their senior scientists to the PrEUST institute for training, which meant that the park was also dotted with older students who, like their younger peers, studied for a full five-year period, without exception.

  During that five years, even the youngest of students matured and were forced to grow up. The standards that they were required to adhere to at once transformed, not only their personalities, but their physical appearance as well. Many of them moaned and whined about wrinkles appearing on their faces because they felt that they'd been studying there for an eternity, even though they had barely completed half of their courses.

  It was always a special occasion when an IRD commander returned to the university campus to meet his educational obligations, but more often than not, they were away on missions.

  “I don't believe it! Who do we have here!?” exclaimed Arch, jumping up from the ground. He was just cooling himself with an ice cream when his friend appeared.

  “Wow! Not Jeff Hayes, the legendary commander?” Pat also joined the ranks of fans.

  “Hey, guys!” he said with a tired smile. “Nice to see you.” They hugged as if they hadn't seen each other for many years. “What's up with you?”

  “Nothing special. Arch and me came to do the art exam. After that, all that's left is the sports exam. When will you do them?”

  “At the request of the IRD we've been given exemptions from those exams, 'cos we have plenty enough to do,” he said sighing with exhaustion.

  “Yeah, we heard,” Archer said. “Africa's a hard place, huh?”

  “You would not believe how hard. The horror that's going on there at the moment … you really don't want to know,” he said faintly. His friends had noticed his unusual condition, but put the wheezing down to the heat.

  “What brings you then here?” asked Patricia.

  “I postponed some biochemistry exams and I've just been catching up,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow. “So what's up with you, man? I hear we're going to be colleagues,” he said, turning towards Arch.

  “Yep, that's right. I'm spending my summer internship working on automated systems development at ASEC. I'll show them how a real robot engineer works.”

  “Good, we need your ideas,” Jeff gasped.

  “And anyway, how are you, Jeff?” Patricia asked anxiously. She could see that something was wrong.

  “I'm fine,” he said, but did not sound his usual hearty self, especially with his pale legs buckling under him as well.

  “Jeff!?” said Archer, who found Jeff's seeming weakness strange. He had always been a staunch guy, his strong character masking any problems.

  Jeff became visibly agitated and seemed to momentarily become dizzy. He started gesturing strangely and indeterminately.

  “Did you know that we're sitting on a time bomb of shit!?” he asked suddenly.

  His two friends looked at each other in surprise. They hadn't seen that coming. It was one thing for someone to be weary after a period of intense combat, but quite another when it also had a serious impact on their behavior.

  “What's wrong, Jeff?”

  “The ASEC can't pull the world out of trouble by itself. To do that we'd need eleven billion people,” he said, wide-eyed, as if he was just about to faint. Just then, an ASEC vessel appeared above them, and Commander Murinko himself descended with two men.

  “Take him!” he instructed his people, who put their arms around Jeff and lifted him up.

  Murinko turned back to Patricia and Archer.

  “Malaria! A few of us picked it up on the last mission. Commander Hayes has been fighting it, but soon he'll be fine, don't worry,” he told them, and disappeared into the ship, which then took off over their heads.

  “That's just great,” Patricia said, turning to her friend.

  The hidden passage

  Since the year before, something had changed about Sean Steersman. There were days when he was a mere shadow of himself, and other when the colored exhilaration of memory overcame him. Karen sometimes found him frightening. She wanted to help, but Steersman always assured her that everything was being taken care of.

  Well, thought Karen, it wasn't at all.

  Karen had exiled Surinder Neelam's team and two thousand technicians into space for the assembly phase of the space fleet, and while she directed of the assembly phases, Steersman often paid visits to the biological R&D department, where evolutionary processes were being simulated with human tissues and cells. He had become almost obsessed with the program.

  What Karen found particularly interesting in his behavior was that, by the time they met for their evening discussions, he always seemed to revert to his usual self, just as he had been before. Then, the next day, as if he had a split personality, he changed again beyond recognition.

  Karen knew it was not an illness and also knew that, when the time came, she would know the reason behind his behavior. She was sure of that, but it didn't make her feel any better. It was the first time that she had ever been afraid of him, not physically afraid, but rather on some instinctive level she was disturbed that he was behaving so strangely.

  *

  After the evening meeting, Steersman stayed behind in his office as usu
al. It was the moment he'd been waiting for all day. He had been trying nearly every evening for almost a year to get to a place, yet he had never succeeded; never succeeded in making it through the hidden passage to a place where he would finally get some answers. After the first two fragments, a third message was successfully deciphered by the code-breakers which excluded any doubt in his mind that he was the mysterious delegate, and it drove him mad.

  … knowledge demands sacrifice …

  The last fraction echoed through his mind over and over again. It was the holy truth. He had paid the price.

  In his office, he had created a place from where he regularly left the physical world. Several times, he felt that his mind hadn't wanted to return to his body. He almost felt sorrow at having to leave that place. At first, this feeling frightened him, and then he created an external intervention system so that he didn't suffer any physical harm. He set a time limit which he gradually increased until he achieved a three-hour ‘departure’, which he considered safe. Then one of his personal bodyguards simply shocked him with a low voltage electrical current on his bare feet, causing him to immediately return to physical consciousness. Though, he deemed it a rather drastic measure, he thought of it as a necessary evil, and it worked.

  He lay back and closed his eyes. He pressed his chin to his sternum and felt his mind sink slowly into a soft, dark welcoming fog. He floated through and arrived to a familiar gloom that signaled the usual starting point. The start was always the same, but the place changed each time, making it impossible for him to map it out. This made it so hard to find anything, as he didn't know what anything looked like. He had thought of every possibility, both real and figuratively, yet what passage was he supposed to be looking for?

  Here, none of the laws of physics existed, which meant that motion didn't exist either. He remained still, but wherever his mind decided to wander, the environment rolled towards him in rippling turbulent waves, sliding past him and surrounding him. Lines of energy tangled and wove into each other, writhing and shining with colors that lit the emptiness. Then again, there were the gloomy areas that dominated the space, areas where the darkness seemed to sit in dense patches with an intensity that he found disconcerting, and made him want to avoid those areas like the plague. They stirred restlessly, threatening. They held a blind secretive darkness that showed no signs of life or energy.

  But now, for some reason, he was fascinated by them, and yet they were the only places into which he had not ventured.

  He was determined.

  He picked out a blue-black mass into which he guided his will, gradually accelerating towards it, but it didn't seem to get any nearer. He could almost feel the speed physically tugging at his stomach and the environment around him began to blur with the speed. He even could feel the wind on his face as he got faster and faster, traveling as fast as he could, yet his goal remained out of reach.

  Then he suddenly stopped as realized there was no point in struggling. Then he did something that he had never tried before. He raised arms and, feeling them obey, he pushed them into the darkness, and froze instantly.

  He could feel its surface at the ends of his fingers, an insane feeling that made his heart pound and nearly leap from his chest.

  He grabbed at the dark mass and then everything vanished. He felt himself fall; not downwards, rather sideways somehow, or upwards. All sense of direction, all of his perceptions seemed to melt away to nothing. His mind became so confused that he thought he was dreaming; and then, he stopped suddenly, so suddenly that it jarred his head, but nothing impacted his body.

  He looked around as his perceptions slowly returned.

  He saw a group of figures some distance away. They stood facing each other, seemingly engaged in some kind of discussion. Their appearance was difficult to determine, but it certainly seemed that they had quite a few limbs. They had no really defined boundary between their bodies and heads, but a flickering darkness seemed to emanate from their heads.

  They noticed the delegate and turned towards him one by one. Steersman had never felt so confused in his entire life. Oddly, he found himself on the ‘floor’, as if he had tripped. He felt the urge to stand up, but then everything disappeared; blinding lights shone all over his skin and he suddenly felt being ejected from their presence. In the corner of his mind, he could hear a short, deafening sound.

  “What the hell just happened?” he asked aloud, opening the eyes on the couch. The robot guard stood next to him, motionless. It hadn't needed to wake him which meant that something or someone else must have intervened.

  He found himself shaking, his mind racing with excitement and thousands of questions that bubbled through his thought processes. He wanted to go back, but he wasn't able to, he was not in the right state to be venturing back.

  They might have been the aliens, he realized that sure enough, but most importantly he finally understood how he had managed to get there. Perhaps this was what he'd been looking for, this hidden passage. That was it, surely. He had found it at last! Yet, it hadn't led to anything.

  He laughed, and then began humming with joy. He felt the urge to give the bodyguards high fives, but they just stood still, staring at him without emotion, waiting. Steersman couldn't contain his elation. He'd been looking for that damn passage for almost a year.

  *

  The next morning, when Steersman woke in his office, he was back to his old self, back to the man Karen had long wanted him to be. He had come back to life because he now knew what to look for. He had to wait for evening to be able to continue and, at first, that seemed the hardest part, but then realized that it wasn't. He now needed to make something of it all. He had been so focused on finding it that it had not occurred to him what he would do if found it.

  That thought cast a damper on his elation and made him reconsider his options. He decided that, as long as he didn't know the answer, he wouldn't go back. First, he would prepare himself. He did not want to relive that confusion and perplexity again. There was nothing more disconcerting or unpleasant to him! Maybe it was that feeling that had pushed him out of there, but it didn't matter. The point was that he had seen them! He recalled the picture of them as they stood there, perhaps talking, a picture that was engrained upon his memories. There had been something dark and glittering, something on their heads, but their entire appearance was bizarre. They clearly had limbs, but as they all stood stationary, it was impossible to see how many they had. More, certainly, than humans. And their bodies were different. Incomparable, amazing!

  Space fleet

  Karen had chosen the surface of the Moon as the space feet assembly base. It had been built on the Earth-facing side of the moon, in a crater that was one hundred kilometers in diameter and the entire base was completely shielded from the sun by a thin foil screen. The screen protected the spaceship frames from direct sunlight which appeared to damage them, though they were resistant to any other form of energy.

  Gravity on the Moon was one sixth that of the Earth, but it still kept workers and objects firmly on the ground. Because the weight of components was a fraction of that on earth, the construction work was being completed incredibly fast. The moon offered perfect conditions for constructing the three gigantic spacecrafts, each 14 kilometers long. The ships were christened Carapace I-II-III, named for their shape.

  Assembly was performed by operational robots that were operated by specialist engineers working from Sumo III modules that had been developed for that express purpose. The living conditions of Surinder Neelam's team and the other specialist engineers were also being tested as part of the space research program.

  The ‘Maid’ commuted between the lunar base and the ASEC center daily, delivering materials, parts, equipment, oxygen, food and water. The ship also took back ill, or debilitated workers for treatment, and brought back substitutes.

  The Maid was the first space vessel specially designed for transporting humans in space. There had been only one constructed and in addi
tion to its NGI drives, strong DCG drives were also built into the hull for propulsion when the ship was closer to Earth or the Moon. The journey between the Earth and the Moon took two hours with the Maid, traveling at over two hundred thousand kilometers per hour. During the first few flights, it had been manned by a team of flight engineers, just to be on the safe side, but it now flew the route automatically, docking with Sumo III modules, navigating through the Earth's atmosphere, as well as flying to the IRD station site, where it delivered and picked up the necessary supplies and staff.

  Karen also flew to the assembly base several times a week, as did all development team members involved in the construction of the space fleet. They often stayed for days on end to carry out tasks, or check finished parts and assemblies.

  There was a month to go until full completion of the ships, at which time all three would leave the lunar surface and set off for an extended unloaded test voyage, which would take several months. Then, they were scheduled to land at ASEC where the official launch would take place. Until that point though, the first space crews were being trained with the same dedication and intensity as they always had.

  *

  The Maid approached the lunar crater on schedule, coming in at precisely the boundary between the light and dark sides. The inhabitants of the base did not follow time, rather the temperature was more the object of their focus. The temperature varied between minus 180 degrees at night and 140 degrees during daytime, a fluctuation that placed a continual strain on machinery, especially SRT units that were working on construction out in the dust and extreme temperatures. They were in direct contact with the most destructive forces and had to be repaired and replaced the most often.