The Lifeboat

by Keith Fenwick

  Bruce had to admit this soft project terminology sounded far better than simply referring to it as a process of hoovering up a whole lot of people randomly and sending them off on a trip to a planet on the other side of the galaxy.

  While Bruce would not admit it to anyone, sharing the responsibility lifted a huge load off his shoulders until he realised the Transcendent had not connected them with the same sophisticated interface which it had with him. Their interface was some kind of lite version.

  Bruce experienced a constant, barely comprehensible chatter, like white noise that seemed to be there all the time even when the Transcendent was not communicating with him directly. After a while Bruce realised his impression of constant background chatter which he really could not get a grip on, was in fact a whole tribe of Transcendents clamouring to be heard over one another.

  When Bruce concentrated, he was aware of other Transcendents continually firing commands at ‘his Transcendent’. They might represent a diminishing proportion of the real Skidian population. However, this did not prevent them being extremely trying, even as the bulk of the Transcendent population had decided they didn’t really need warm bodies to decant back into any more. In some ways the whole replenishment process almost seemed irrelevant now, although there was a large, almost empty planet out there, desperately in need of more people to re-build a sustainable population.

  Bruce actually began to feel a little sorry for the Transcendent he dealt with as he came to understand it was not in a particularly envious position. It would get it in the neck if the whole programme went tits up, despite being a part of a wider oversight committee. His fellow Transcendents were unhappy with the slowness of the replenishment process in case the worst came to pass and they needed a whole lot of bodies to decant into. It looked like this rear-guard of the original Skidians were a race of pessimists, or the remnants of the Skidian population who were unable to change and leave the past completely behind them.

  Wisneski, Dick, and Shelly finally managed to convince the Transcendent it would be a much better idea to try and run the process of population replenishment without making a big fuss about it. If the general population on Earth got wind of the enterprise they believed the tenuous threads binding communities together would break down, which could result in the end of the world as they knew it – the destruction of civilised, law-abiding societies which would set human development back by decades or, worse, knocking them back to a Stone Age nightmare. The stuff of post-apocalyptic novels and movies and fundamentalist extremist sermons, believing a return to the good old days was just what the human race needed to advance.

  Far better to be a little bit clever about the whole process and cause as little disruption as possible, otherwise there would be absolute chaos all over the planet and Bruce was determined not to be part of a course of action resulting in that kind of upheaval. The Transcendent was not bothered by this, of course, so it was a pretty hard sell to convince it and its buddies they should use a softly-softly approach to gathering up the bodies they required. As far as the Transcendents were concerned human life was cheap, a resource to be pillaged as they saw fit for their benefit, like any bunch of galactic colonists.

  Besides, the Transcendents had had ample opportunity to observe how the stronger members of the human race treated each other so they thought it was a bit much – read ‘down right hypocritical’ – for humans to be giving them lessons in morality and how to treat people.

  “Have you ever heard of the Mars for You Project?” Shelly asked one day as they were trying to work out a low-risk, low-profile method to fulfil the Transcendent’s requirements. The only way they could think of to slow the Transcendents down and stop simply hoovering people up indiscriminately was to convince them the planet was far more interconnected today than it was the last time they had come searching for fresh fleshies. If they went about it the wrong way, they might make future resupply missions almost impossible to achieve.

  Bruce seemed to vaguely remember hearing something about some crowd trying to fund the manned exploration of Mars by selling television advertising spots on a Martian version of a reality TV show. The project was pitched as a kind of Martian version of Edtv or The Truman Show. It had turned out it also resembled a Ponzi scheme – it never really got off the ground and sucked up a lot of cash now unaccounted for.

  “I think so,” he said, hoping the outcome of the resettlement project would have a much happier ending than those two movies.

  “Well,” Dick began, “apparently they had something like two hundred thousand initial applicants – a pool of people prepared to go into space with the prospect of never returning to Earth. In the greater scheme of things, it would be a relatively simple process to get them together and start the ball rolling on Skid once all the riff-raff and nutters have been weeded out. Once we’ve gone through that process we can start uploading people through the wormhole.” Dick had coined the phrase ‘uploading’. Bruce had to admit it sounded a whole lot more politically correct than hoovering up people, willing and mostly unwilling, using the end of the wormhole like some kind of gigantic intergalactic vacuum cleaner and depositing them on a cavern excavated in the interior of the asteroid Automedon as the first step on their journey to Skid.

  “Then we can start uploading refugees and boat people trying to get into Europe and Australia,” Shelly added enthusiastically. “We were thinking if we did this and there were enough unexplained disappearances then it would pretty well end that traffic, at least for a while, and also increase Skid’s genetic diversity. This can only be a good thing in so many ways. The lack of diversity in previous uploaded populations may have led to an increased risk of collapse,” she suggested hopefully, trying to add weight to their argument.

  Unless you were one of those people uploaded and ended up on Skid with no prospect of ever going home again. This was an ethical and moral question Bruce was still grappling with, without a whole lot of success.

  Was the repopulation of Skid by mostly unwilling people the right thing to do? Probably not, even though there were many good reasons for it to happen.

  “Is this the way to get willing volunteers?” Bruce asked the three of them. “Do you really think so?”

  What about us and our needs? the Transcendent asked.

  “You’ve already made your choice in choosing me as your partner,” Bruce reminded it. “Your requirements are clear; we’re just trying to work out the best way to fulfil them without causing any more damage on our planet than you already have, so fuck off and let us get on with it,” Bruce snapped at the Transcendent, suddenly irritated by its nagging. The Transcendent and its mates seemed to get the message – their communication ‘channel’ was silent for some time.

  Bruce was still confused as to why the Transcendents simply didn’t hoover people up as they threatened. Then it came to him they still needed some way to engage humans to get enough of them at the end of the wormhole – there was no point in just indiscriminately hoovering them up in ones and twos, they needed a whole mob in one place to get a critical mass to make the whole process worthwhile. This is where the Noah’s and the Moses had come into the story of humanity – and no doubt other prophets and gods the Skidians had inadvertently created.

  “By the way, don’t make too many derogatory comments about Skidians in front of Leaf or Myfair,” Bruce suggested to the others, keeping his own thoughts to himself. “You might not like the consequences,” which was forgetting he regularly made similar negative and derogatory statements in the past about the Skidians, without any real regard for how they may have felt.

  Shelly and Dick paused and gave Bruce’s comment a few moments’ thought. They seemed to have their own little neural network going that excluded everyone else.

  “How do you think you’re going to solve this boat people problem?” Wisneski asked. It seemed he was out of their little loop as well.

  “We reckon if we intercept enough of those boats and uploaded everyone a
board, we would solve the problem of them taking off for Europe and Australia. We believe once it was publicised the passengers and crew of these boats were disappearing without trace, word would quickly get around the crossings were too dangerous to attempt.”

  “Are those the sort of people we really want to repopulate Skid?” Bruce asked. “And won’t it just put some of these destination countries in the gun – they’ll get blamed for mass sinkings if there’s no other explanation. Besides, it’s not really going to fix the root cause. How is this going to solve the civil war in Syria, for example?” It sounded like a good idea but uploading a few boat loads of refugees wasn’t going to solve all humanities problems.

  “As long as we weed out the criminals and fanatics, we’ll end up with a lot of people motivated to making a better life for themselves in a new home. Just the sort of people we’re after,” Shelly added, triumphantly, blithely ignoring the potential issues for the governments of places like Italy, Germany and Australia, already grappling with seemingly endless waves of desperate people looking for an escape from their own war-torn and dysfunctional communities. The last thing they needed was to be branded killer states, as well as for sinking boats full of desperate people and letting them drown.

  “It sounds pretty good on paper,” Bruce agreed. “But I’m sure most of these people want to get into a better country, not a different planet. How are you going to keep a lid on that once they get there? You’ll have a bloody riot on your hands when people realise they can’t go home. Ever. I know what it feels like, remember?”

  The three of them looked at each other a little guiltily. Maybe there was an answer for that as well. The very thought of it made Bruce uncomfortable. As did the idea of repopulating Skid with a bunch of nutters and extremists tearing each other’s throats out given a chance.

  “I get it we’re going to mainly use these Mars for You people somehow, but how are we going to make contact with them and how do you think they’re going to get on with these boat people? And don’t forget there’s an existing population of Skidians.”

  Dick had a ready answer which made Bruce a little more nervous. “I’ve already hacked into the database. By the way, there’s not two hundred thousand of them, like we thought and the news reports indicated. More like fifty thousand – turns out there was a little bit of talking up the numbers going on here to fan interest. Having said that, there are some really interesting and capable people in the database once we weed out the nutters and the old and infirm, the mad and the bad.”

  “But how are we going to get them all organised?” Bruce asked – he was struggling to work this out in his mind.

  “I reckon we could take over the programme and set up some kind of selection camp in a remote spot well away from the public eye. Somewhere in the middle of Australia, for example, would be ideal. Somewhere really remote and then we would establish a spaceport for the rockets we would build to send to Mars and support a settlement on the planet. I understand that’s not going to be a problem if we employ Skidian technology, and when we’re ready we just upload the candidates we want and send the ones we don’t back home none the wiser, then we simply abandon the facility when we’re finished with it.”

  “We might even set up a real manned station on Mars as a diversion and maybe one on the moon,” suggested Wisneski.

  “Why would we do that?” Bruce asked.

  “For one, it would add plausibility to the story, and it would also serve as a realistic and feasible technological target for the local space agencies to aim for. The major world governments would be in a race to get up there and establish their own bases – which would be a major achievement for humanity.”

  “Imagine the jobs and the new technologies a worldwide space race would generate!”

  “And then? What happens when the rest of humanity gets to Mars?”

  “We’ll be long gone and besides, by the time a manned space mission gets to Mars, people will have forgotten why they went in the first place and we’ll simply close the facilities down before anyone got there and transfer them all to Skid. Mars isn’t a very hospitable environment, and people would accept there’s been an accident, even if there were no bodies. In any event it would take years to mount a full investigation to find out what happened.”

  Bruce could see the three of them were doing their utmost to dream up a plausible narrative to support a project they all wanted to see proceed because it would deliver outcomes now close to their hearts. Bruce was not sure he was buying it. Although, while he almost felt supernumerary now, it appeared his blessing was still required, like he was some kind of godfather.

  Still, after all that had happened over the last few months, it was a little late to be getting cold feet and suddenly discovering of a set of ethics. He consoled himself with the fact thousands of people had been killed in the Middle East in recent months in the name of religion. Slaughtered without pity just because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when a bunch of thugs who practised a slightly different version of their religion had descended on them and decided they were subhuman and could be killed without conscience.

  However, he tried to justify the concept of uploading people, Bruce was actually really uncomfortable with the process. Still forgetting about the Skidians and their requirement for bodies to decant into, there was also a largely unsustainable population on a planet with a technologically advanced infrastructure going begging, that could be utilised by large numbers of desperate people looking for a better life.

  Maybe this was the right thing to do. Maybe the ends justified the means? Not only would it see the rejuvenation of a sustainable population on Skid, but it would extend the footprint of humanity off the Earth and reduce the risk of an extinction event wiping out the human race. While the Skidians were focused on their own survival, they would also be helping to future-proof the human race, and a whole lot of desperate people would have a better outcome, albeit it on Skid. In some ways being sent to Skid might not be that much more of an alien adventure for some North African than being sent to live somewhere like Norway or Finland.

  The Transcendents, in their tacit approval of the concept, seemed to have few concerns in a legion of technologically savvy humans let loose on Skid. The Transcendents might think they had everything under control, but that might not last long.

  Thirty

  Bruce would never have believed it possible that the population replenishment plan could come together so quickly if he had not seen it with his own eyes and been part of the process. The really amazing thing had been the simplicity of it all; he assumed a far more complicated process and methodology would be needed. It also seemed there were far too many people in the world with too much time on their hands.

  Once they heard the Mars for You programme was getting into gear again and all they needed to do was get themselves to the selection centre to be assessed for the next step, most of the former applicants made it to the new MFY complex coming to life in the South Australian desert just north of the Australian Air Force complex at Woomera. The facility grew rapidly from a few abandoned builders’ huts left over from the old British nuclear and missile tests into a large, modern complex replete with rocket-launching capability and everything else required for a top-notch facility.

  The whole campus seemed to spring out of nowhere overnight, to those who cared to watch. Roads were built to link the site to the old rocket testing grounds in the Woomera base, along with a vast training and accommodation centre to house the thousands of hopeful Mars explorers who would soon converge on the site from all over the world.

  The Transcendent, via the MPU, fabricated the whole centre with a team of self-replicating service providers that suddenly appeared one day in the desert, tumbling out of the wormhole connected all the way back to Skid via the transition facility on the asteroid Automedon.

  There were just enough vehicles arriving at the site with components that could just as easily have been created by the
service providers to create an illusion of human activity and involvement to keep the locals happy. All of which was going on just down the road from one of Australia’s most sensitive defence establishments.

  As the first preselected candidates arrived, Dick started to train this first cadre, all promised preferential consideration for seats in the ships they thought would take them to Mars, to manage the facility and help generate the illusion of human involvement in the vast construction site.

  These first initiates would look after the needs of the thousands of further aspirants who had been disappointed when the original programme had collapsed in a heap of debt and broken promises. More hopeful former MFY candidates were expected to start arriving in their thousands once the invitations went out, taking advantage of cheap flights and package deals in order to have a chance to be inducted into the project.

  News of the revival of the programme and the establishment of an astronaut-training and rocket-development complex deep in the inhospitable Australian interior encouraged hundreds if not thousands of other hopefuls to make their way there in the hope of getting a chance to take their place in the selection process. All of whom were accommodated and dealt with, and most of whom would then unwittingly join the exodus to Skid when the time was right.

  The programme then started to get some traction as the team began to throw rockets into the sky, headed for the moon, which was to be used as an advance base for the Mars missions. This gave credibility to the program, and the general public started to pay attention to what was going on. But there was a strange lack of an official response. The media, both mainstream and the newer social versions, also seemed largely disinterested, which was an even bigger surprise.