But Rusev was confident none of that would be required; between this lander’s extremely efficient reclamation system and its ability to generate water from the Earth-like atmosphere outside, which was markedly more humid than that where Holly’s lander had touched down, water would be the least of their concerns.
“Shelter is obviously not a problem,” Rusev went on, satisfied that her lengthy water comments had convinced everyone that they were safe on that front. “We have two landers, but to avoid being divided by the distance between them or suffocated by proximity in here, we can construct the HEM in a matter of hours.”
“HEM?” Robert asked.
“Habitat Extension Module.”
Though unfamiliar with the concept, Robert nodded in a blunt kind of understanding of what the individual words meant. “And what about food?”
Rusev hesitated slightly. “We have cubes of nutrition powder and almost nothing else. There’s a small amount of coffee if anyone truly can’t stomach the taste of the dissolved cubes on their own, but I don’t recommend that mix. We have a sufficient number of cubes for now, but our absolute priority has to be finding the Karrier. There are more cubes in there than we could ever need — quite literally — and I’m hopeful that the dining machine will be recoverable.”
Holly and Dante shared a wordless glance; unlike Rusev, they had seen her algae machine being ripped from the utility room’s wall. The force with which it hit the floor left them unsure as to whether it would be salvageable even if the Karrier had touched down gently.
“What if we don’t find the Karrier?” Viola asked, voicing what everyone was thinking.
“In that event,” Rusev said, “or in the event that we discover the Karrier has been destroyed by an explosive or otherwise catastrophic impact, it will become our sole priority to find a local food source.”
“How realistic do you think that is?” Viola pressed, sounding more worried than she realised.
Yury interjected with a one-word answer: “Quite.”
“We can’t eat rocks,” the girl said.
“No we can’t,” Yury agreed, smiling slightly. “But although Holly tells me there was nothing but rocks around your lander, there is lichen outside this one. The air is far more humid here. While your lander insulated you against a murderously cold night, the temperature here remained comfortably above freezing. By any kind of climatic scale, the landers are in extreme proximity. So given the differences between their surroundings, who knows what kind of plant life could be supported in other areas? Dante has already seen trees — or at least something like them — and given what we already know about the air and soil composition, I firmly believe it’s quite realistic to imagine that abundant and edible plant life exists somewhere on this planet.”
“But that’s a fallback,” Rusev stressed. “Our focus is the Karrier. The nutrition cubes, the radio, the cargo…”
Grav clapped his hands together without warning, startling everyone. “This extension is not going to build itself,” he said. “And the day is not getting any longer.”
“He’s right,” Yury said, rising to his feet with a strained expression as his troublesome left knee resisted every inch of the way. “I’ve done this before. It’s not difficult, but it’s not fast.”
“Can I help?” Bo asked, speaking his first words since entering the lander.
Yury smiled broadly. “You’re helping whether you like it or not, little man,” he said, patting Bo on the head when he reached him. “Many hands make light work.”
“I’ll stay,” Rusev said. She sat down across the table from Holly, in Yury’s seat. “Someone has to stay inside, to guard against any potential problems with using the entry code to get back in. I can unlock the hatch manually from in here.”
Holly remained in her chair. “And I’ll be with you soon,” she told the rest of the group. “We just need to talk to Robert about something for a few minutes. Grav, could you keep a close eye on Viola and Bo while they’re helping with the extension?”
Robert looked as surprised as anyone, but Holly focused solely on Grav. She hoped he would take her very public request for Robert to stay — something that would inevitably raise questions as to why — as sufficient evidence that she had very good reason to make it. His quiet nod suggested that he did.
“They’ll stay where I can see them,” Robert said in a firmer tone than normal.
Holly held Robert’s eyes. When he didn’t budge, she shifted to Viola.
“I want to help build the extension,” Viola said almost immediately.
“Me too,” Bo added. “You can watch us from the window.”
“It’s only five minutes,” Holly said.
Robert let out a relenting sigh. “Stay within arm’s reach of Grav. No exploring,” he said, focusing firmly on Bo, who he evidently deemed more likely to behave irresponsibly. He then turned to Grav. “Arm’s reach.”
“Arm’s reach,” Grav echoed.
The lander then quickly emptied save for Holly, Robert and Rusev. Robert stood over the seated women. “Okay,” he said impatiently. “What do you need to talk to me about?”
“Roger Morrison,” Holly said.
“I’ve told you all I know,” he replied.
“Right. And I’ve told you all I know.”
Robert held his hands out, palms up in mild exasperation. “So why are we in here?”
Still talking to Robert, Holly turned to Rusev and looked intensely into her eyes. “Because she knows a lot more.”
twenty-one
“I know you have a plan to expose Morrison,” Holly said, still holding Rusev’s eyes. “And I think Robert’s family can help us with that — help us a lot — but first we need to fill him in on everything we know. And, at the same time, you need to fill me in on everything I don’t.”
While Ekaterina Rusev was certainly no Roger Morrison, she was nevertheless an extraordinarily wealthy and significantly powerful person in her own right.
Rarely did anyone speak to Rusev in the kind of tone Holly had just used; Robert watched on, suitably uncomfortable.
Rusev, on the other hand, remained entirely unflustered. “Do you know how he first came to prominence?” she asked, aiming the question at Robert.
“Romotechnology,” the man replied. “If the backstory he spins is true, he was a young theoretical physicist of some promise until he abandoned his research post and disappeared for several years. The version I’ve heard is that he then returned to the university one day and told everyone he’d found the key to changing the world and expected to unlock the door within a decade. That must have been thirty years ago. And the rest, as we know, is history.”
Holly could have done without the reminder of how long had passed since her first exposure to Morrison, the Australian magnate who now sat atop the GU pyramid. That first exposure had come when she saw his joyless face on the cover of a magazine almost thirty years earlier, and to this day she still remembered the headline: “Meet the man from down under who’s about to turn the world upside down.”
Holly remembered the headline because she remembered the article, and she remembered the article because every word of Morrison’s bold predictions had long since been proven prophetic. Even at the time, Holly viewed Morrison’s description of his breakthrough as “the most disruptive innovation there will ever be” as an odd thing to say; more typically, an arrogant upstart might proclaim his innovation the most disruptive in history. But in a point that was illustrative of his general outlook, Roger Morrison had paid little attention to bettering the past and instead focused his attention on dominating the future.
The breakthrough that made Roger Morrison’s name and changed the world forever was a material one. More specifically: romotechnology.
Romotechnology was a catch-all term somewhat egotistically coined by its famed proponent, encapsulating everything from self-replicating romobots to the bottom-up construction of complex objects they made possible. Usually shortened
to romotech, the field dealt with the manipulation of matter on a level that all but a tiny few people couldn’t even comprehend. As Rusev’s algae machine used basic building blocks to create a convincing imitation of a real meal, romotech’s fundamental dexterity enabled the formation or construction of almost anything.
Given some of the extraordinary applications that were shown off shortly after the word romotech was first spoken in public, many observers quietly believed that Morrison — or perhaps his hidden associates — had been furtively perfecting the technology for far longer than the official story suggested.
In any case, the romotech revolution was far more centralising than any before it; for unlike the agricultural, industrial, informational and robotic revolutions, one corporation — one man — owned everything that made romotech tick. Another key differentiation, directly related to the first, was that the romotech revolution was not one of easily adopted ideas like crop rotation or assembly lines but rather one built on a fiercely protected proprietary breakthrough with built-in safeguards against any and all attempts at reverse engineering.
What countless other brilliant minds had discussed and attempted for well over a century, Roger Morrison had actually achieved.
In the decades-old magazine article which remained etched in Holly’s mind, he had promised that his romotech would clean the world’s oceans and purify its air as well as enable innumerable industrial and military advancements. Over the next few years, the environmental applications were predictably the slowest to materialise.
“And I presume you know how the Global Union first came to be?” Rusev said, inflecting this into a question for Robert.
“As much as anyone else knows,” he shrugged. “I know the general circumstances that created the need for something like the GU. The original GUTA came into being just before Viola was born. A few weeks, maybe a month.”
The Global Union’s power and reach had grown tremendously in those seventeen years, with complex and existential challenges since requiring even the largest nation states to cede ever greater portions of their sovereignty until the GU became a de facto world government and the nations themselves little more than administrative divisions.
The genesis of the modern day GU could be traced back to a series of initially distinct challenges which ultimately converged, exacerbating each other to the point of a full-blown crisis. The most crushing early blow came in the form of an aggressive and rapidly spreading blight which caused widespread crop failures, with the resulting famine bringing mass starvation to once fertile regions. Unprecedented droughts in politically unstable areas led to enormous unrest and untenable migration patterns which in turn made a mockery of international borders and created acute resource shortages in the receiving countries. As though seizing its opportunity, a wicked strain of a flu-like virus wreaked havoc in denser-than-ever population centres and spread like wildfire.
With traditional power rendered moot, the world’s great nations were on their knees. As Yury once put it to Holly: “the politicians and generals realised two things: you can’t nuke a virus that’s already spread, and you can’t negotiate with crops that won’t grow.”
Step forward Roger Morrison, who proudly and urgently insisted that his romotech breakthroughs — by then proven viable beyond theory, some eight years after his promise of great things to come — could end the famine and cure the virus. Lacking the capital he needed to go it alone, Morrison used all of his PR nous in offering to turn over his intellectual property rights to a responsible international entity capable of funding and disseminating the necessary applications.
A supranational institution known as the Global Union for Technological Advancement was formed to fund and administer Morrison’s expensive but conceptually proven solutions, with binding authority to collect contributions from all national governments based on a set percentage of their GDP.
By Viola’s fourth birthday, both the blight and the virus had been defeated. While Morrison kept a low profile despite being hailed as a hero, the resounding success of his grand project led to a slight expansion of the Global Union for Technological Advancement, with the suffix “and Environmental Protection” being added to its name and its GUTA acronym expanding to the less easily pronounced GUTAEP. Almost immediately, the shorthand “Global Union” and “GU” terms fell into common parlance.
Holly’s time as the face of the public space program had coincided with the worst months of the famine, a large enough issue to reduce her government’s appetite for unrelated scientific investment despite being primarily a faraway foreign problem. The dialling back of the public space program led to her ill-fated switch to one of the two well-funded private programs; one which Roger Morrison had at that point recently acquired, rechristened, and begun devoting his time to micromanaging.
Two years later, the disastrous psychological fitness test which dumped Holly on a supposedly alien planet and ended with two avoidable deaths effectively spelled the end for Morrison’s space venture; though no one who knew what happened would ever speak of it, Morrison knew that morale at the top of the organisation had been irredeemably obliterated.
And then it happened.
“Devastation Day hit when Olivia was expecting Bo,” Robert said, his voice straining. “Just like Viola, the world in which he was conceived was very different to the world into which he was born. And Viola was only six, so she doesn’t really remember the old world. For their entire generation, the crumbling world we left behind is normal. They don’t know anything else. They don’t know how much everything changed on that day.”
More than any other day or event in recorded history, Devastation Day truly was a turning point. It was the default “before or after” point for any memory. It was the day that changed everything.
The most destabilising blow of all came first, when three powerful blasts obliterated a meeting of world leaders. Within minutes of that attack, a series of expertly coordinated strikes destroyed crucial infrastructure across the globe; from dams and bridges to power plants and air traffic control centres.
Space ports too were decimated, with the public program’s director and Ekaterina Rusev’s husband both brutally executed. Rusev owed her life to her presence on the just-completed Venus station, while Morrison and the remaining employees at MXA, his own space research facility, were evacuated minutes before it was blown to pieces. The evidence Bo had unearthed regarding the tampering of interview footage on the subject of the MXA explosion fitted in perfectly with the fact that Morrison, unlike his rivals, survived the day unscathed.
Ancient wonders were also deliberately targeted throughout what soon became known as Devastation Day. The perpetrators announced each cultural target seven minutes before it was destroyed; not to give people time to flee, but to ensure the largest possible viewership. Iconic monuments which had endured for centuries and in some instances millennia were reduced to rubble in seconds. No religious sites were targeted and there were no patterns or signs of any particular ethnic group being targeted more or less than any other.
By the end of a day which left the world numb with shock at the unbelievable extent of the destruction, a previously unknown eco-terrorist group claimed responsibility for the atrocities. Their statements, delivered verbatim by broadcasters under evident duress, claimed that the blitz had been “necessary to eliminate the criminally corrupt figureheads who have led us to the edge of oblivion,” and that the ancient wonders of the world had been destroyed “to highlight the arrogance of modern man; mourning the loss of his ancestors’ meaningless aesthetic creations while turning a blind eye to the corporate rape and relentless degradation of the very ecosystem which makes his vapid life possible.”
Two words best encapsulated the global reaction: helplessness and outrage. Though immediate civilian casualties were remarkably and deliberately low, certain kinds of attacks which had been overshadowed would go on to have a lasting impact; the destruction of seed banks was one, the annihilation
of top-level medical research facilities another.
Needless to say, the scale and nature of the attacks elicited a huge and immediate response. The sheer ability of the terrorists to pull off so much at once not only showed governments that nothing and no one was safe, it also showed citizens that their elected governments were no longer capable of the core task of protecting them from danger.
The simultaneous deaths of so many world leaders created countless regional power vacuums and a near-universal appetite for a vast expansion of the GUTAEP, which had so far proven extremely effective in its restricted fields of operation.
Roger Morrison led the calls for an expansion of the Global Union for Technological Advancement and Environmental Protection. Before long, all but its first two initials were officially dropped.
At the stroke of a pen, the Global Union became the most powerful supranational institution in history. In turn, by centralising resources and effectively eliminating international competition for them, this enabled citizens and national administrations alike to focus on rebuilding local order within their regions.
The eventual news of the decisive elimination of the group responsible for Devastation Day was met with cheers, despite the covert nature of the GU’s bombing campaign meaning there would be no trials nor incarceration of the perpetrators.
But relative international harmony could not mask the rumblings of discontent in the years that followed as centralised mismanagement led to further food shortages and unsustainable migratory patterns. Civil liberties were eroded piece by piece, with all policing and justice policy set at the GU level.
When accusations of misconduct and corruption among top GU officials reached untenable levels, calls for reform subsided only when Roger Morrison — who had withdrawn from public view despite remaining a key player within the GU — finally agreed to run for leadership.
Hugely popular among workers across the globe for his calculated refusal to sanction certain applications of romotech which would have replaced the need for a frightening percentage of existing jobs, Morrison won unopposed and promised a new kind of rule to tackle humanity’s new kinds of challenges. A well-spoken populist, he insisted that the GU under his leadership would embrace its position as a one-world government rather than continuing to pretend otherwise to avoid provoking nationalistic resistance in certain countries where such sentiments bubbled under the surface.
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