But, there was no way he wanted to make things any worse than they already were for Bruce, as he and his family owed him one for springing Trev free. Assuming of course Bruce had not compromised him in the first place.
Shelly thought some things were probably better left unsaid for the moment. “I think that can wait until we have spoken to Bruce, er Mr Harwood.”
“Which will be when?”
Wisneski checked his mobile. “Your brother will be landing in a little while, and I suggest we hit the road early tomorrow morning. I need to locate Bruce, of course, and arrange transport.”
“Already under control,” Dick intervened quickly, trying to and succeeding in making a role for himself in the enterprise. “So let’s eat.”
Wisneski felt a little inadequate for a moment. Here he was, a representative of probably the world’s biggest military, espionage and security apparatus, being cleverly manoeuvred by some backwoods hick from a country he had never even heard of before he met Bruce. He felt the situation was careering out of control. Then this feeling of inadequacy soon turned to one of liberation as he sensed he was leaving his former heavily regimented life behind him.
He settled back and found himself being entertained by Dick’s clumsy attempts to charm Shelly. Wisneski did not fancy his chances as Shelly no doubt had had many suitors over the years and could pick and choose her mates. Many of them, given the circles she moved in, rich and powerful, so she would be more than a match for someone as unsophisticated as Dick Todd.
Wisneski assumed she had a standard response mechanism to rebuff any advances she had no interest in entertaining. If she did, then to his and, he assumed, Shelly’s surprise, it appeared Dick had already breached her first line of defence without even breaking sweat.
Wisneski had seen guys like this in action before. Somehow, whatever their looks, however sober they were, despite any obvious obnoxious, antisocial habits they had that would normally be completely unacceptable to any decent female, they had women hanging off their arms before any mere mortal had even worked up the courage to introduce themselves. Maybe, he thought, maybe because she was just so damned attractive she was starved for attention, and Dick was perceptive enough to have worked that out. He had also clearly quickly established how to flatter her and was both perceptive and confident enough to pull off a full-frontal assault.
While part of him was a little put out – he was jealous of the way Dick effortlessly and almost disdainfully worked his magic on Shelly as she was lapping up the attention and looked for all the world like she was ready to follow Dick wherever he went – another part of him was intrigued as to how this performance would play out over the next hour or so. He ordered himself another drink and settled down to enjoy the entertainment.
Twenty-two
“So, how do we go about the selection process?” Bruce asked the Transcendent as he sat on the veranda steps. He had in his mind it could be a bit like drafting a mob of sheep. All you needed to know was the criteria you were sorting on.
Bruce knew it was going to be a far more complicated process than checking a sheep’s ear mark as it came up the race toward him but he was trying to break down the Transcendent’s requirements into manageable chunks he could then process.
It was a philosophical question really and Bruce was not looking for an immediate answer. Despite all the drama unfolding about him, he was feeling pretty relaxed and wanted that feeling to last forever. Finally, just being home – and the few beers he had consumed – seemed to leave him feeling more laid back than he could recall in a long time. Although, even as he thought it, he knew this was the lull before the storm.
It suddenly struck him just how stressful, one way or another, the last few months had been. He had always had this nagging doubt something was not quite right with the world, the part he inhabited anyway. In fact, this inexplicable feeling had been there for longer than he could remember, a quiet voice had been insistently speaking to him and raising these doubts. He realised while he had not been aware of it, the MPU had probably been riding around in his head since before he had left Skid, and the Transcendent may also have been poking around in there from time to time.
Bruce was aware that if he thought his life was complicated now it was certainly going to be far more complex in the very near future. However, the difference now was he felt he had a lot more control – maybe not full in control – over events for a very long time. To put it simply, he now knew what was going on and while he could not in reality say no to the Transcendents, he could, if he really wanted to, as long as he was prepared to live with the consequences.
We need fleshies with good genes, who are healthy and fertile. There are markers we can use to exclude the mad and the bad, and intelligence is not high on our list of requirements, the Transcendent piped up.
Bruce realised the last thing the Transcendents wanted was clever fleshies taking control of the technology that maintained Skid and denying them the bodies they had so carefully prepared in the process. There was also the secondary worry that clever fleshies who were not as grateful for the opportunity to live on Skid as the Transcendents seemed to think they should be, might succeed in finding a way back to Earth or, even worse, finding a way to transcend themselves. The last thing the Transcendents wanted was sharing their space with a bunch of entities they considered to be a lower life form, something which made Bruce’s position ambiguous to say the least.
“That’s going to be a tough job. Once we announce this, um, expedition every nut job on the planet and every government will be putting forward themselves or their candidates to try and take advantage of the opportunity to travel into space. You could potentially depopulate entire towns and cities, and some small nations.”
This is not your concern, Bruce. We’ll make all the arrangements. We have a tried-and-tested process for this and we have had plenty of practice.
Yeah right, just like the MPU and all the other high-level technology on Skid that happened to go haywire at the most inconvenient time, Bruce thought. Somehow, he knew it was all going to turn to custard and he would be left to sort things out for the Skidians, new and old, the fleshies and the Transcendents. Again. This didn’t really impact on his frame of mind; it was something which seemed inevitable to him. That was before he thought too deeply about the morality of what the Transcendents – and himself by association – were doing.
We need a large facility to hold and process the fleshies after the initial screening process.
“Not around here, mate,” Bruce responded emphatically. ‘Not around here.” He had a feeling that was what the Transcendent was angling for. “You really need a really remote site, like somewhere in central Australia, where you would be able to pretty much do whatever you need to in peace for a lot longer than if you set something up around here. How long do you think you will need?”
Only a few of your days for the actual transfer process, if all goes according to plan. It will take some time to move millions of people through the wormhole to Skid via the staging process on the asteroid.
Which it won’t, of course, Bruce didn’t say. The plan, he meant. He was unsure if the Transcendent understood what he was getting at. “And you still haven’t explained how the selection process will work. Surely that’s the most important matter to resolve? Just how are you going to make those selections and how are you planning to get all those people in one place to upload them? Are we just going to come out and audition people pretending they were auditioning for the movies or something?”
For a being normally so ‘chatty’, the Transcendent was strangely silent for a moment. Maybe the concept of a systematic selection process and a means to get the successful candidates in one place without creating too much attention had not previously crossed its mind.
“I get it. You don’t actually have one, do you? Your plan is still based around somehow hoovering up a whole lot of people, using your wormhole like a vacuum cleaner, and put them through some kind of
screening programme to draft out who you need then let the rest go. Am I right?”
As he waited for the Transcendent to respond, Bruce reminded himself this this was further proof how most of mankind’s creation myths, the stories of angels and the concept of god and heaven must have evolved along the key figures of Moses and Noah. The Transcendent’s talk of plans and a process was just waffle.
The creation myths known to mankind were all down to the repeated Skidian forays to Earth in search of flesh-and-blood bodies to populate their home planet after one cockup or another. Then to cap it all off, these myths and legends must have been started by the rejects, the ones left behind. Who in fact were not rejects, from a human perspective, because they were the catalysts for change in their societies, if for no other reason than the hoovering up of all the dumb, fertile people left a whole lot of brighter people behind, who then had the opportunity to interact in ways which might not have otherwise occurred. Among other things, they would record their experiences for posterity and develop the concept if you lived a good life and abided by some simple rules, your reward would be to be taken up into the sky and live in a world where all your physical and spiritual needs were met. Heaven. Paradise. Concepts seeded by the Skidians, no doubt.
Bloody hell, the Skidians, the original ones, had managed to raise the average IQ of mankind without even trying. Talk about unintended consequences.
It was not quite like that!
Bruce knew he had touched a nerve when he heard anything remotely akin to an emotional response from the Transcendent. In all its dealings with him it had maintained an aloofness bordering on superciliousness. However, this time Bruce had clearly hit home with his comments.
It was not the first time he had wondered whether the Skidians, the real ones, the Transcendents, were half as clever as they clearly thought they were. It almost seemed they had stumbled over this transcendence capability before they were psychologically ready to fully utilise the process. Having a need for a body to decant back into was perhaps a sign they were not as mature as they would like to pretend. Surely a race who had developed this kind of capability would have thought the end-to-end process through? Despite all their grand talk, they had no effective plan or process. It was all very ad hoc sounding, and simply hoovering up bodies was not going to be possible in this day and age. Well it was, he reflected, but it would cause an uproar that could end in some kind of global conflagration.
It was no wonder the human race was so stuffed. It was all very well for the Transcendent to stare down its metaphorical nose at what it considered a lesser form of life, but in reality the Transcendents were a big part of the problem and were behind the main divisive issues still wreaking havoc on the planet by being the main driver of all the creation myths. Which in turn were the root cause of many of the ills that still impacted on mankind, the religious arguments and wars that still bedevilled the planet.
Yet, without their clumsy intervention down through the generations, human development might have taken a very different route.
And possibly a worse one, the Transcendent interposed.
Which Bruce had to admit was true. Alternatively, he was sure that a world where fewer of the craziest, most power-hungry people around didn’t have the banner of religion to hide behind as they wreaked havoc on the rest of the population in the name of their god, would be a much better place to live. Mind you, if the Trancendents had not given man religion, no doubt some fertile mind would have invented it and the story to hang it all together.
With that happy and rather sobering thought Bruce took a last drag on his smoke and flicked it into the night.
Twenty-three
Even though he had half expected it from the way Shelly was gazing at Dick with an expression of absolute adoration, from the way she hung on his every word, stroking the back of his hand absently – while they discussed how she thought a selection process for a human lifeboat mission could work if they could pull it off – it still came as something of a surprise when the two of them suddenly stood without any obvious warning signs and left the table together. Before Wisneski had really processed it, Dick and Shelly were saying goodnight, and Shelly was all but towing Dick away in the direction of the lifts.
“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Wisneski muttered to himself.
But, the two of them were already halfway across the restaurant before he had his wits about him. How the hell did that happen? One moment they were discussing how they would hit the road as soon as Trev and Sue Harwood arrived; the next thing he knew; Dick was telling him they could all catch up at breakfast. “Not too early you understand,” he added with a wink that would have been corny and sleazy under other circumstances but now seemed rather appropriate.
Wisneski looked at his drink and his half-eaten meal. He had only had a couple of beers. Was there something he had missed?
Finally, he shook his head and laughed to himself. As he did so, his phone vibrated on the table, announcing an incoming text.
Trev Todd and Sue Harwood had been cleared through customs and immigration by the local authorities who were now requesting further instructions from Wisneski – he had met with them on his own arrival.
This mission was so hush-hush not even the spooks at the local Consulate were in the know. Wisneski had just discovered a loose arrangement facilitated the informal, under-the-radar movement of people in and out of any friendly country, no questions asked. Even the United States, which had taken paranoia about border security to new heights in recent times, was in on the arrangement.
Wisneski texted the hotel name back to the sender along with instructions for Trev and Sue to meet him in the bar and he would take it from there. With that task complete, he settled back to finish his meal and drink in comparative peace and quiet. Something that would be at a premium once Sue Harwood was on the scene.
Wisneski was not really looking forward to having to deal with her again. She had a strong sense of entitlement and was not backward in making her feelings known, even if she generally made little sense. All in all, she reminded him far too much of his ex-wife for Wisneski to ever take her seriously, and he hoped she would not make a scene in the bar – there would not be much he could do about it if she did except appeal to her better judgement, which he reckoned she didn’t have much of.
Trever Todd was a different proposition – he could probably be mollified by a few drinks and a hooker if required. If this country and the hotel had such things to offer.
Wisneski had just enough time to polish off the very good steak and had just ordered another beer when Sue Harwood announced her arrival at the reception area adjacent to the restaurant by protesting loudly that this kind of treatment was not on and she wanted to complain to the manager. He could hear someone trying to placate her in the background but he struggled to pick up the other side of the conversation as the accent was foreign to him.
“I don’t care, I want to see someone from the US Consulate; this is an outrage: I have been transported against my will across an international boundary and …”
Wisneski had a lot of sympathy for the poor sod on the end of Sue’s tirade. Probably a driver, or maybe even someone from the hotel, or some local spook.
Then he could hear a man talking to Sue. “There is a representative of your government waiting for you in the bar,” he began. “This way, please. He can answer all your questions, and you can address all your complaints to him.”
“You!” Sue exclaimed loudly as she saw Wisneski at his table. “I might have known.”
“Please sit down and let’s not make a scene,” Wisneski said, trying to be reasonable.
“What do you mean? I have rights,” Sue insisted. “I …”
“Please sit and keep your voice down. I have managed to get you out of the States, a feat you should be thankful for, and I’m about to deliver you to your husband, so a little gratitude wouldn’t go amiss, thank you very much.”
“But …”
“But nothing. At the very least you could say thank you,” Wisneski repeated.
“I’d like a beer please,” Trev said to a waiter hovering over the table.
“Will your guests be staying for dinner?” the waiter asked.
“Do you two want to eat?”
Sue glanced around, for all the world looking on the verge of bursting into tears. Moisture welled up in her eyes and her lips started to quiver.
“Can I have the menu, please?” Trev asked. He, at least, was sticking around, making the decision for the two of them. “Have you seen my brother?” he asked Wisneski.
“I’m afraid he is otherwise engaged at the moment but he is here in the hotel.”
“I bet he is.” Trev leered in such an unattractive way Wisneski realised even though he had only met him briefly, Dick Todd was by far and away the most likeable of the two brothers.
“Yes, please,” Sue said to the waiter after evidently tossing up her options and realising she did not really have any.
Not unsurprisingly Dick and Shelly arrived together at the early breakfast Wisneski had arranged by the simple expedient of getting room service to give them all an early wake-up call. While they arrived hand in hand, they both wore completely different expressions.
Shelly was clearly still smitten by Dick, which was something of a surprise as they were an odd couple if ever there was one, even though Wisneski had witnessed the seduction the previous night. Could you call it a seduction? he wondered. It looked more like Dick had bewitched her or surreptitiously tipped a date rape drug into her drink the way she fell for him. He did not appear to have much going for him that would make him attractive to someone like Shelly.
Dick, on the other hand, appeared completely oblivious to Shelly’s charms. He was offhand almost to the point of rudeness but Shelly seemed to lap it all up and kept coming back for more.
The Lifeboat Page 37