Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  “I don’t like it in here,” Viola blurted out. “Can we just take the photos and go?”

  Holly nodded. There was definitely something particularly unnerving about the sight of so many tiny cribs in such an unnatural and synthetic environment. Synthetic really was the best word, she thought; for Terradox as a whole, but for this haunting nursery more than anything else.

  The nursery proved to be the final room before they reached a door which looked like it led back outside but which was definitely not the one they came in.

  Holly opened it to find a stairway. She led the trio’s way to the top, where they emerged at the rear of the grand white house, below the window which had been thoroughly smashed during Viola’s explosive release of pent-up aggression.

  This sight raised a smile on the girl’s face which made Holly glad the stairway had led them here; trivial though it was in the scheme of things, Viola was now left with a better final memory of New Eden than her unsettling few minutes inside the vacant nursery.

  Darkness fell during the drive back to the lander, but the rover’s powerful headlights and excellent climate control system made the return leg of the journey as easy as the first.

  “I just don’t get it,” Viola said, shifting from her comfortable position to sit bolt upright. “How does something like this happen? How does someone like Morrison get in a position to do something like this?”

  “A little bit of knowledge and a whole lot of power,” Holly said, her tone less flippant than the words themselves.

  Yury nodded in agreement. “My own personal belief is that he was poisoned by Brock’s work and empowered by political circumstance,” he began. “It was as simple as that. He was not alone in feeling the pull of Brock’s words and his support for her later theories wouldn’t have been an issue if there hadn’t been a growing appetite for a one-world government even before he stirred the pot. But the thing to remember about Roger Morrison — the most important thing to remember — is that he truly is a rare kind of genius. A mind like his, so sharp in so many fields, comes perhaps once per century. And when a genius like that has the drive to achieve his goals and is granted the power to actualise his theories, well, the rest of us better hope that his goals align with humanity’s best interests. Unfortunately, this particular genius found a home in Brock’s theories during a difficult time in his childhood. A keen mind; distant parents; few friends; little faith in others. That story, it rarely ends well.”

  Shortly after this discussion trailed off, and despite its unsettling content, Viola fell asleep and remained peaceful for the rest of the drive. This left Holly and Yury to talk openly for the first time about their truest hopes and expectations.

  Holly refused to entertain any thoughts of failure in her own mind but listened willingly to Yury’s reservations. One thing he shared was her confidence that the rescue team would safely reach and land on Terradox without any real difficulty. The entrance procedure was laid out in explicit detail on the bunker’s computer system with step-by-step and foolproof instructions for how to begin the process of sufficiently weakening the target section of the romosphere’s physical barrier one “layer” at a time, resealing each once the incoming vessel crossed it before opening the next in order to prevent atmospheric leakage. The exit procedure was easier still, with the barrier automatically weakening in the same layered fashioned to allow the outgoing vessel to depart safely.

  Where Holly and Yury differed was their optimism, or otherwise, over what would come next.

  The Venus station’s long-planned exposé of Roger Morrison’s involvement in both Devastation Day and the crippling famine before it — an already firm case which had been strengthened even further by two distinct pieces of new evidence provided by Robert and Bo Harrington — seemed almost trivial compared to what had since come to light. But given the near-incomprehensible magnitude of what Morrison was planning, Yury told Holly that he could no longer envisage him going down with anything other than a bloody fight.

  “The plan as it stands is that we’ll be gone before the next scheduled data transfer,” the old man said. “Okay? That means the transfer won’t go through and Morrison’s Reset will be delayed. Postponed. Pushed back. Not cancelled. Not prevented. To prevent it, we have to bring him down.”

  Holly was listening.

  “But as long as he thinks Terradox is waiting for him and his GU cronies and whoever else he planned on bringing along, he’ll fight tooth and nail to stay in power. They’ll suppress all dissent. They’ll deny everything we say.”

  “But we have proof,” Holly said. “Not theories; proof. We can point everyone to the ark. We can show them all the photos of this place. We can tell them where this place is.”

  Yury was quiet for a few seconds before sighing gently. “Be honest with me here, Holly. Be honest with yourself. If you weren’t here and you didn’t know Rusev personally, would you believe it?”

  “Believe what?”

  “This! Terradox! That Roger Morrison built a planet. No one knows what a romosphere is, so planet is going to be the only word for it. Oh, and don’t forget… it’s invisible, too. And… and… the grand reveal is coming from the hand of Ekaterina Rusev, his only surviving old-time rival.”

  Holly said nothing.

  “I don’t mean to suggest that our situation is hopeless,” Yury said. “The ark is something he won’t easily be able to explain, for one thing. But if we want to decisively reveal Terradox to the world, we have to find a way to actually do just that. We have to find a way to uncloak this planet. To expose Terradox would be to expose Morrison so totally and so definitively that even he couldn’t wriggle out of it. He either destroys Terradox when we reveal it, thus preventing a Reset, or he falls when undeniable visual proof leads to the world learning of his evil plans…”

  Holly finished the thought: “Thus preventing a Reset.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So what about the remote control thing Dante’s primer mentioned?” she said, her expression brightening and her shoulders straightening as the idea hit her. “It said he used that to weaken the barrier as the Karrier approached, right?”

  “It did say that,” Yury said. Despite his non-dismissive words, the tone made it clear he was far from convinced that Holly’s idea was as useful as she thought.

  “Well I’ll find it,” she insisted. “Dante had it on board, so it has to be somewhere, and there might be instructions.”

  Yury shrugged. “It can’t hurt to look.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” Holly asked, her own tone less aggressive or confrontational than the choice of words might have suggested.

  “Not yet. But we have smart people and 36 hours to think of one.”

  When they finally reached and entered the lander, Yury first, he turned to Holly with a finger held to his lips as Bo and Robert slept soundly. A message from Grav lay on the table, stating that he was spending the night in the bunker with Rusev.

  Holly waved a silent goodnight to Yury and returned to help Viola out of the rover. The girl’s expression was so peaceful that Holly considered leaving her there, but she ultimately deemed it unsafe to bank on the rover maintaining a stable temperature throughout the night. Reluctantly, she woke her for the few steps to the extension.

  Viola didn’t speak as Holly led her inside; aided by the near total darkness and the absolutely total silence, the girl seemed to remain half asleep.

  Holly briefly considered going to the bunker after leading the exhausted Viola to bed but quickly decided against it. Rusev and Grav were both experienced enough to know that a few hours of sleep was a worthwhile use of time in any circumstance and was particularly necessary in times of crisis when alert decision-making capabilities were essential. Holly knew this, too, and she wisely decided to act upon it. The radio would awaken Rusev and Grav if an important message came through, in any case.

  Holly settled quickly in the knowledge that sunrise would usher in the group’s last full d
ay before the rescue Karrier’s arrival, necessitating final preparations for departure and the search for both Dante’s remote and the “better idea” sought by Yury.

  Tomorrow, more so than ever, clear heads would be needed.

  Day Nine

  seventy-four

  Grav was sitting comfortably at the lander’s table when Holly and Viola made their early-morning entrance after a brief but refreshing rest. Yury, always an early riser, sat across from him while Robert continued to snore gently from the other bed with Bo curled up on the floor beside it.

  “Spaceman told me what you found and showed me the images,” Grav said. He clapped his hands together twice, rousing Robert and Bo. He then swiped through photos on the table’s inbuilt screen and settled upon the display case detailing Morrison’s evacuation ark. “This thing in particular… this is big. Knowing the location of his launch site is huge.”

  Flicking again through the photos, Grav joked about Viola’s “reorganisation” of Morrison’s office when the pictures of the fallout covered the table’s surface. She laughed for a second but eagerly swiped the images away before Robert and Bo made their way over to the table.

  Bo asked the obvious question before Robert had the chance: “What did you find?”

  Yury took over, recounting the events of the previous day while utilising the exploring trio’s photographic record to illustrate. The images of the museum captured Bo’s imagination. He and Robert both asked who the propaganda displays were intended for, as the trio had wondered at the time.

  Yury set up his response by swiping to the next series of photos. “We think the answer lies here,” he said, looking down at the vacant nursery.

  In the cold light of day, the nursery’s unnerving atmosphere came through the two-dimensional image more than Holly had expected. Still, though, the comfortable surroundings of the lander prevented the creepiness factor of the images from coming close to the feeling of standing inside the vast, cold, silent nursery; the whole ambiance had been beyond unsettling, and she was glad that the photos couldn’t come close to capturing it.

  “Why is he planning for loads of kids to be born here?” Bo asked. “I thought this place was just a temporary refuge and they were going to go back to Earth after the Reset? Isn’t that his plan?”

  “I think that is the plan,” Yury said, “because there are only a few hundred beds and we know that the ark could — and would have to — carry a lot more than a few hundred people. But I think Morrison wants to die here, because the above-ground house is surely for him. Brock wanted a human population of no more than half a million and Morrison probably wants the same, but even if he brought a few thousand on the ark along with frozen samples it would take a serious amount of time to rebuild to anything like that level.”

  Viola chimed in: “So do you think the children who would’ve been born here would ever have gone to Earth?”

  Yury shrugged. “I don’t want to say ‘breeding program’ when we’re talking about human beings, but that’s what this looks like. My own guess is that the children born here would have been taken to Earth at a certain age but it’s just that: a guess.”

  Robert cleared his throat and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “Do any of these details really matter at this point? Surely our focus should be on the order in which we’re going to release all of our evidence against him. Isn’t that where we are right now?”

  “It was always Rusev’s plan to take him down with the truth,” Grav said. “We were going to do it from the station and she was confident even before we had proof of this place. The exact order—”

  “And we have more stuff now,” Bo interrupted. “Like the footage I found — the footage that proves the GU education board have edited history to change the narrative about Devastation Day. That links him to it.”

  “There’s something else Rusev and I already knew about that no one else does,” Yury said.

  These words immediately piqued Holly’s curiosity. She exchanged a glance with Grav, who had known about the existence of Rusev’s takedown plan slightly before she had. His current expression made it clear that he truly didn’t know what Yury was talking about now.

  “There’s a top secret GU division,” Yury went on. “A very small one, but it’s very well-funded. They call it CSP: Catastrophe Survival Preparation. Based on what we know now — i.e., Terradox exists — it seems pretty clear that the CSP division is a front for preparing the evacuation without raising alarm. It could be one of those situations where the vast majority of individuals working on it don’t know anything about the big picture. In fact, I’d say that’s almost guaranteed. We’ve seen a small number of leaked documents which discussed a regularly updated database of ‘genetically diverse and intellectually valuable individuals’ who know they’ve been chosen for salvation in the event of an imminent asteroid impact or similar civilisational threat. We know the list includes Morrison’s inner circle and is largely made up of GU employees along with a smaller number of handpicked individuals. The documents we’ve seen are intercepted invitations sent to some of those individuals. Both recipients lived in Queensland, which fits very well with what we’ve learned about the ark.”

  No one said anything for several seconds until Grav, speaking in a far angrier tone than he ever had to Yury in the past, took the words from Holly’s lips: “Why the hell am I only hearing about this CSP shit now?”

  Yury didn’t react, having evidently expected such a response. “There’s a reason Rusev is still alive,” he said, “and it’s because she lives by one simple rule: no one knows more than they need to at any given moment. Morrison is the same way, hence keeping his employees and even his close allies in the dark about everything except the specific things their jobs require. It’s nothing personal, it’s just sensible. Any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Just look at Dante! If he had known everything, so would Morrison.”

  Robert groaned. “So what about the order of the information we’re going to release? I don’t particularly care about who knew what when. We’re all here now and we need to be very clear about exactly what’s going to happen.”

  “The CSP program,” Yury began, “the ark, Terradox, the Reset… all of that will be revealed last. The evidence we have regarding Morrison’s links to the deliberately engineered famine and to Devastation Day itself will create tremendous instability. There’s a two-pronged benefit to leading with those points: it will make neutral citizens extremely angry and distrustful towards Morrison and the GU at large, and it will ensure that they are paying attention when we deliver the final blows. There could well be riots before we even start dealing those biggest blows. When we expose the existence of this place and his plans for the Reset, there’s no way he can survive. Rusev has been thinking a lot about the order of the early reveals; Olivia’s research, our own evidence from earlier whistleblowers, all of that. She’s going to be ecstatic to hear about the ark’s location, because it will give protestors and resisters somewhere to gather. But the key thing — the crucial thing — is that our evidence will be curated and our releases timed, not dumped en masse.”

  “About my wife…” Robert said. He began speaking to Yury, but then turned to Viola and Bo. “I only kept this from the two of you because I thought it could only make you feel worse, but I feel I should tell you now since you’re going to see it soon enough. Your mother recorded a video before leaving the house on the day it happened. She said she feared something bad would happen and that her colleague — who Morrison framed — shared her concern. She thought she’d been under surveillance since publishing the paper which hinted at the blight having been engineered in a lab, but she had no choice other than to go to the scheduled meeting. Her exact words were that she thought she was already in too deep and that running would put us all in danger. She went to work that day to protect you. To protect us.”

  “She called me in the afternoon and said she loved me,” Viola said. “There was some made up reason for
the call but she never ever normally said that, so I knew something was wrong.”

  Robert had held up well during his description of his wife’s video, but his stoic facade cracked slightly in response to Viola’s story.

  “Why haven’t I heard about this video?” asked Yury, rarely one for sentiment.

  Grav, who’d known as little about it as Yury, suppressed a smug grin. “It is almost like Rusev was not kidding when she said that no one should know any more than they need to at any given moment.”

  “But did anyone else know?” the old man pushed. “Dante, specifically?”

  “Definitely not,” Holly answered. “I was there when Robert told Rusev about the video and she explicitly told us not to tell anyone else, at least until we recovered it from the lander. I didn’t tell anyone even after that, Robert didn’t tell anyone, and there’s less than no chance that Rusev would have told Dante.”

  Viola was next to speak. Holly expected a reaction to the news that she had also known about the video and had kept it from the girl, but Viola surprised her by raising an unrelated and wise concern: “What if Morrison gets suspicious or concerned about the first leaks and does something to react, before the biggest bombshells drop?”

  “There are two things to think about there,” Yury said, sounding very confident. “First, he isn’t leaving Earth until he knows Terradox is safe, and the data transfer which would tell him that isn’t scheduled until two full days after our Karrier leaves this place. That gives us more time than it will take. Second, right up until the final reveals, he’ll have no reason to think Terradox is under threat. We’re not even hinting at this place until we reveal it.”