Terradox

by Craig A. Falconer

  Olivia’s evidence was leaked alongside the Devastation Day evidence, which included Bo’s proof of interview tampering as well as witness testimonies and documentary evidence that the eco-terrorist scapegoats did not exist, had never existed, and had in fact been dreamt up during a meeting between Morrison and several of his inner circle. This evidence took the form of a defector’s written recollection rather than a decisive recording of Morrison talking about the plan, but it included so many hyper-specific and incriminating details that it really was the next best thing.

  Once safely received on Earth, the data was forwarded to all major media outlets, with the famine-related evidence being distributed first. Rusev worked on the necessary assumption that at least one outlet — just one — would break rank over such an explosive story and that others would inevitably fall over themselves to play catch up once the cat was out of the bag. The GU sanctioned all media outlets, but in some regions — primarily North America, Eastern Europe and the British Isles — a well established pragmatic concession meant that several relatively prominent outlets remained privately owned and were merely overseen by the GU’s Department of Information rather than directly operated by agents of its bloated bureaucracy.

  The proof of deliberate crop sabotage had been enough to get the media ball rolling, and the public reaction was so intense that by the time the shock-inducing Devastation Day leaks began to flow, groups of angry citizens who were already nearing breaking point had taken to the streets to make their voices heard. The largest early protest was at the GU’s Northern HQ in New London, just a few miles from Olivia Harrington’s home.

  GU forces reacted slowly at first, but raids were soon ordered and carried out on the first media outlets to have covered the Olivia Harrington story. Rusev had foreseen this unavoidable collateral damage, expecting that the GU would initially assume that evidence was being fed to these outlets by sources on the ground. All that the raids accomplished was adding legitimacy to the very news which the outlets had been violently reprimanded for breaking. When the Devastation Day leaks spread like wildfire despite these outlets being out of commission, citizen unrest went global.

  The impromptu gathering in New London rapidly grew in both numbers and intensity, ultimately spilling over into violent clashes. Security forces stationed at the demilitarised political compound at the centre of the protests, so used to implicit obedience through fear, were hopelessly overwhelmed by a rushing mass of furious protestors who quickly claimed the building as their own in a humiliating blow to the GU’s previously unquestioned authority.

  At that point, Rusev and Holly alike knew there was no way the GU could ever come back from this. As it always went in times of oppressive political rule, the first crack in the system’s facade of total control showed the mass of disenfranchised citizens that they were not alone in their discontent and that there truly was power in their numbers. Proving this assumption correct, media outlets who had been too cautious to report on the initial leaks openly broadcast live footage of the still-growing anti-GU protests and reported on the earlier raids on their counterparts.

  Little did anyone on Earth know, the grandest revelations were yet to come.

  eighty

  Phase two of the leaks began with the only thing phase one had lacked: an incriminating recording of Roger Morrison himself. This was part of the evidence pool that Rusev and her team had gathered for their pre-existing plan to breed anti-Morrison sentiment once they safely reached the Venus station; the plan Holly had known nothing about until Grav told her, and the plan which had become a whole lot more urgent now that the depths of Morrison’s depraved plot had become clear.

  There were in fact two recordings. The first was an audio-only clip of Morrison bemoaning the socio-political necessity of “reining in the limitless applications of romotech’s current potential in order to avoid the catastrophic disruption that would result from putting too many hundreds of millions of bottom-feeding leeches out of work when their drone-like labour becomes as unnecessary as they are.”

  This was a solid start — no one liked being discussed in such terms, and it would destroy Morrison’s artificially curated image as a champion of the common man — but it wasn’t enough.

  Fortunately, what came next was.

  The highest-ranking defector from Morrison’s inner circle, a relatively young man who had died in suspicious circumstances two years earlier just days after contacting one of Rusev’s confidantes in New London, had given his life for a decisive fifteen-second video clip in which Morrison casually stated his desire to witness a “Brockian population Reset” within whatever remained of his lifetime.

  Although the footage didn’t catch Morrison saying he intended to catalyse or cause such a Reset, the context of the rest of the leaks meant that his desire alone was enough to seal his position as public enemy number one. The footage was accompanied by everything Rusev and her team had garnered about the GU’s euphemistically named Catastrophe Survival Preparation division, including the evacuation ark’s precise location in Far North Queensland as discovered during Holly’s speculative and fruitful trip to New Eden.

  Combined with the evidence firmly linking him to the costly famine and the mass destruction of Devastation Day, Morrison’s explicit desire to see humanity culled to a tiny fraction of its current number made it easy for people to believe that the CSP division’s true purpose was to protect a chosen few during a destructive event that he and his cronies would deliberately bring about.

  Although the relative isolation of the ark’s base prevented a mass gathering of protestors on the scale of those seen elsewhere — a factor Rusev had underestimated but which fortunately proved unimportant thanks to the sheer size and ferocity of those other gatherings — a moderately sized group of citizens did gather at the Far North Queensland site. Their presence, so quickly following the increasingly violent protests elsewhere, was enough to encourage many low-ranking site employees to flee. One of the protestors captured illustrative footage of GU employees in retreat; this single recording, as much as anything captured during the already spectacular day, perfectly epitomised the collapse.

  With phase two’s leaks sinking in and the attention of many media outlets now turning to the teased announcement of another reveal to come, Rusev passed the latest updates on to Yury via the Karrier’s radio connection to the Terradox bunker.

  “So it’s time?” he asked. “Time to uncloak?”

  Given how readily the previously leaked information had been believed and acted upon by Earth’s downtrodden citizens, a large part of Holly now strongly regretted allowing Yury to stay behind. Was the reveal even going to be necessary?, she wondered. On reflection she considered that it was; after all, there was no indication yet that Morrison would give up his throne without a fight. The time since the very first leak could still only be measured in hours, so there was no telling what kind of response might have been coming. And although the ark’s launch site had been fled by many GU employees, a well-armed security force had since sealed the perimeter. In short, there was no guarantee that the Reset wouldn’t still go ahead if Terradox remained a viable destination.

  “In your own time, Yury,” Rusev replied. “And whatever happens, your sacrifice won’t be forgotten.”

  There was of course a steadily growing two-way communications delay between Terradox and the station-bound Karrier, so everyone waited with bated breath for Yury’s next reply. Grav hurried out of the control room and returned very quickly with Robert and the children, who he thought deserved to be there to see and hear whatever came next. A screen in the control room focused tightly on Terradox’s location, relaying the image from the Karrier’s high-powered telescope. This image was naturally subject to the same lag as Yury’s speech, which meant that his countdown would be in perfect sync with the pictures.

  “Thank you,” Yury said. “Tell Holly and Grav it was an honour to serve with them.”

  “I’m here,” Holly said, mom
entarily forgetting about the delay. “We’re all here.”

  Yury began to count down from five.

  At four, Viola grabbed Holly’s hand and squeezed it tightly.

  “Three…”

  Bo watched through his fingers.

  “Two…”

  Holly’s eyes flicked to Rusev and Robert. Everything they’d all been through came down to this. Not days, not hours, not minutes, but an instant. It all came down to the press of a button in an underground bunker on a man-made planet; a press of a button by the finger of a man who was willingly risking his well-lived life for the good of the many. The result of his selfless decision — be it success or failure — was about to be revealed.

  “One.”

  eighty-one

  It was a stunning and humbling sight.

  One part marvel and one part monstrosity, the Terradox romosphere emerged from its cloak in one breathtaking moment and filled the control room’s large screen.

  “The computer is telling me it is done,” Yury said, relaying his experience on the surface, “but so far I am alive and well. Did it work?”

  “It worked,” Rusev said. Holly said it too, as did Bo in an extremely excited tone.

  Holly didn’t yet share his excitement. It had worked, and that was the main thing, but it was too early to celebrate Yury’s survival. Terradox was a lot closer to the Karrier than it was to Earth, from where it wouldn’t yet be visible.

  Terradox was neither large enough nor close enough to Earth to be observed with the naked eye, but with the grand uncloaking came an earthbound message from the Venus station informing amateur and professional skywatchers alike where they could locate the final piece of Morrison’s apocalyptic jigsaw. This message, personally drafted by and attributed to Ekaterina Rusev, who revealed herself to have survived Morrison’s sabotage after all, strove to make it perfectly clear that he hadn’t merely created and hidden a perfectly habitable planet but that he had in fact planned to use it as a refuge while he cleansed the Earth of its human population problem.

  Within twenty minutes of the reveal, during which time Yury asked the group to keep him abreast of important events and reactions on Earth, Holly finally allowed herself to revel in the reality that Morrison and his cronies must by then have known that Terradox had been uncloaked. In her mind, the fact that it hadn’t been immediately destroyed bode extremely well.

  The most dangerous moment had been the precise moment when Yury pressed the button, Holly knew, because there had been a reasonable chance that Terradox might have been rigged to self-destruct in a manner not forewarned in the bunker’s documentation. Now that neither this worst-case scenario nor the more likely prospect of a remote destruction as soon as the uncloaking filtered back to Earth had come to pass, a different kind of tension took over: the tension of not knowing when something bad might happen or indeed how bad it might be.

  Communications from the station soon told Holly and everyone else aboard the Karrier that media outlets on Earth had begun to show the first still images of Terradox. The images rapidly increased in both number and quality as every telescope on Earth was directed to the incredible — the impossible — celestial body which had just emerged from its cloak.

  Holly personally passed this update on to Yury. Like her, he began to breathe slightly more easily and took it as a sign that Terradox, and by extension his life, was no longer in immediate danger. “The truth’s out,” he said. “Blowing it up won’t change anything now.”

  A tangible sense of relief surged through Holly. As Yury stressed his view that having survived this long he was likely to survive a lot longer, Rusev met Holly’s gaze and nodded in agreement.

  “Everything’s working out,” Holly said to her. She didn’t inflect this into a question, although it partially felt like one.

  “It looks promising,” Rusev said, breaking into a rare and full smile. “I’ll say that.”

  Quite understandably, the next images of citizen unrest to arrive on the control room’s screen via the station were the worst yet.

  Worst or best?, Holly quietly mused.

  Countless media outlets were now openly and proudly recording their own footage of the ever-intensifying anti-GU protests and the ever-increasing numbers of GU employees fleeing their falling strongholds across the globe. All of this, not least the media’s open disobedience, would have been unthinkable just a day earlier.

  When Yury later reported his plan to sleep for a few hours, Holly decided to allow herself the same luxury.

  The floor of the lander she shared with the Harringtons may not have been the most comfortable surface she’d slept on in the last two weeks, but the rest it provided was the most peaceful by far.

  Day Twelve

  eighty-two

  Tumultuous scenes from Earth filtered through to the Karrier all night, as more and more GU premises were ransacked and claimed by various local and national resistance groups.

  Holly awoke to the headline that Roger Morrison had fallen in a so-called “bloodless coup” which involved desperate attempts by self-serving underlings and political rivals to distance the GU from his actions. Though their pleas fell on deaf ears, the footage of the ageing and silent Morrison sitting in the custody of the GU’s Vanguard Corps made it very clear that these weasel-like scoundrels had committed to the irreversible course of removing Morrison from power. This would have been something of a victory in and of itself, but Holly knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the whole GU was done for.

  Viola and Bo, both too young to have previously witnessed the fall of an authoritarian regime and both having been born into a world in which once iconic footage of historic popular uprisings around the world was universally banned, were in awe at the pace of the overnight developments on Earth. Rusev told stories of dictators’ statues being toppled as soon as the first cracks in their facades of power emerged while Grav did his best to explain just how precarious an order built on fear and suppression always was, speaking with more than a hint of joy in his voice as he insisted that a house of lies can never survive a purifying fire of truth.

  The children nodded like they understood, but it would take more than a few doses of historical perspective to subdue their amazement at seeing the only ruling force they had ever known resigned to history.

  Seeing Morrison, as frail as he was, paraded as a lone wolf by those he had once led elicited no mixed feelings in Holly; however old he was, he deserved to be held accountable for all he had done and all he had planned to do. More pertinently, everyone who had suffered at his hand deserved to see him held accountable. Holly also looked forward to seeing the expressions of his treacherous underlings when their time came.

  Indeed, individuals who assumed roles as leaders of many of the largest protests voiced their views — loudly backed up by the masses in front of whom they spoke — that the entire GU had been proven a corrupt and oppressive force; one which would no longer be tolerated.

  Whether they knew it or not, the weasels’ time was imminent. The tide hadn’t merely turned against the GU; a tsunami of truth was in the process of sweeping its world away.

  “So can we go back for him now?” Bo asked when he woke and saw just how decisively things had progressed overnight. “The danger has passed, right?”

  Robert immediately spoke to rule this out, saying that the only sensible course of action was continuing to the station and then sending another crew to rescue Yury. “We arrive tomorrow,” he stressed.

  Rusev affirmed this position. “But don’t worry,” she said to Bo. “He will be rescued. And soon.”

  In a long conversation Holly had with Yury in the late afternoon, amid her regular checks on the latest developments on Earth, he revealed that he had always been confident of surviving the uncloaking. The increasing communications delay made a back-and-forth chat difficult, but Yury explained that he had known Morrison wouldn’t destroy Terradox from the moment his eyes fell upon the grand white house at New Eden.
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br />   “There’s a reason I let on that I didn’t expect to survive,” he said, “and it’s that you wouldn’t have let me stay if you didn’t know I was fully prepared to die. If you thought I expected to live, you would have told me it was too risky. I couldn’t express my position through rationality without expecting you to pick holes in it — I’ve known you long enough to know that! — so I kept my confidence to myself. Rusev shared it and followed the same line of thinking. She said that once Morrison’s cat was out of the bag, why would he kill the cat or burn the bag?”

  Holly didn’t feel misled and certainly not betrayed by Yury and Rusev’s selective truth-telling and she couldn’t begrudge their logic; if she had thought for a second that Yury’s decision to stay was at all based on any expectation of survival, she knew better than anyone that she would have tried to talk him out of it.

  For however long Holly watched the footage of GU buildings being overrun, she would never grow tired of it. She spent the evening revelling in the downfall of an organisation which was the furthest thing from a failed experiment in its supposed goal of global cooperation and had in fact been nothing more or less than the ultimate fantasy of a corporate and political elite tired of navigating national and international regulations and eager to entrench their own powerful interests. Everyday citizens — so often dismissed as leeches — weren’t even afterthoughts to such interests; they were, and always had been, obstacles. Now that the truth was out, those obstacles had reclaimed their streets and begun the process of reclaiming their lives and societies.

  Holly wandered into the utility room and found Viola ordering a meal from the algae machine.