Nisha’s worry looked to have faded slightly upon having this logic laid out, but it wasn’t gone completely. “I get that, but I just don’t like the idea of there only being two of you.”
There was not even the merest hint of a suggestion of jealousy on Nisha’s part — she knew Rachel well and liked her a lot, and Chase was as loyal as they came — and she would in fact have been delighted if her concerns were so shallow.
“You could always come with us,” Chase suggested, eyes lighting up in sudden hope. “If I said I wanted that, you know I’d get it. And you are fully qualified…”
“There’s no way I could leave Vijay,” Nisha replied, decisively and without missing a beat.
Chase’s lips parted to reply, but Nisha cut him off before a single sound could escape.
“And don’t say he can come too,” she said, struggling not to laugh at the fact that Chase had very clearly been about to suggest that very thing.
“I’ll be back in four weeks,” Chase stressed after a brief pause, holding Nisha’s eyes as his voice grew suddenly firm in an attempt to change the direction of the evening. “Everything will be okay and we’ll have this exact dinner the night I get back. The only differences will be that you won’t be worried and I’ll be the one who steals the wine and presses the buttons. Deal?”
“Deal,” she said, smiling as much as she could.
When their perfectly crafted algae-based meals and their perfectly produced Terradox wine were nothing but delicious memories, Chase leaned back on the sofa and put his arm around Nisha.
“So…” he said, “you really weren’t going to tell me about this exciting little asteroid they found this morning, huh?”
Nisha sat up straight and turned to look at him. “Who told you?”
“Grav,” Chase answered.
“Who told him?”
Chase shrugged. “Who told you?”
“You do know where I work, right?” Nisha replied.
He grinned. “So why didn’t you tell me? I know Holly told everyone who knows to keep it quiet for now, but I thought you would have told me…”
“I would have if you weren’t going on a difficult mission tomorrow. It’s not like this is a secret. Did Grav make sure to tell you that it’s definitely not any kind of danger to anyone? Its path isn’t going to bring it too close to anyone or anything. Earth, Terradox, the station, Arkadia — they’re all safe. It’s really far away, obviously, but it’s going to pass closer to Arkadia than anywhere else and the closest pass is going to come in around thirteen months. Holly thinks that’s going to give us time to build a probe here and then launch it from Arkadia, just like the plan for the minisphere.”
This time it was Chase’s turn to sit up straight. “Grav didn’t tell me that last part.”
“Why do you suddenly look so excited?” Nisha asked, relaxing back onto the sofa and primarily glad that Chase wasn’t angry she’d kept the news from him.
“Well, if you’re telling me that we’ll be able to build something that can reach this asteroid in time for when it passes Arkadia…”
“Do I want to hear the rest of this?” Nisha asked, sighing lightheartedly.
“Probably not,” Chase laughed, collapsing back onto the sofa with a hopeful glint in his eye as he put his arm around her again. “At least, not until I get back.”
eleven
As Patrick ‘Patch’ Hawthorne blew out his six candles in a room of only his family’s closest and trusted friends, the adults around the table did their best to forget the world and give him a nice day.
Viola couldn’t help but notice how tired Robert looked, and she didn’t have to wonder why.
At her father’s suggestion, Viola always tried to focus on the fact that the vast majority of people fully and excitedly supported every aspect of the Arkadia project. This widespread and near total support existed partly because of who was involved and what had gone before, but partly because of the natural desire for exploration and discovery. In a world that didn’t have its lunatics to seek, it warmed Viola’s heart to know that the undying spirit of the majority hadn’t been broken even through two disheartening decades of Global Union rule.
A rare positive news story had come recently when newly rediscovered recordings were made available which featured the late Yury ‘Spaceman’ Gardev talking about his early concept for a Kosmosphere. These were security tapes capturing organic conversations rather than any carefully worded explanations of his idea, but they were popular nonetheless and were roundly accepted by the masses as legitimate — which they truly were — despite everyone knowing that such video footage could be convincingly spoofed with trivial ease.
Yury was still a major public figure — now more than ever, if anything — and Viola had finally come to accept that the cult of personality around the seven saviours really was no bad thing, with the main benefit being one of general social cohesion.
Robert, ever wise, had made this point most clearly in telling her that it wasn’t as though people on Arkadia would one day turn against a perceived Harrington-Ospanov dynasty as they might against an oppressive hereditary monarchy. “Everyone knows what you did,” he said. “Everyone knows what we did, and that’s why they look at us the way they do. It’s not about bloodline, it’s about legacy.”
Like the majority of citizens, Earth-based national and international space agencies were also fully on board with the project, knowing full well that the observation data that Arkadia would provide was sure to assist their own operations. The potential benefits were almost boundless, of course, but this was a good starting point.
As soon as the visual cloak was removed following Chase Jackson’s exploration of the surface, Arkadia would begin providing excellent imagery from the vast array of incredibly powerful telescopes which surrounded its atmosphere-retaining ‘ring’ of romobots, giving unparalleled views in all directions. Crucially, researchers on Arkadia would also be able to send probes to all kinds of previously hard-to-reach bodies.
The key point which scientists of all disciplines understood was that just like those made by researchers on Terradox, whatever breakthroughs were made on Arkadia would be swiftly and openly shared with Earth. Robert publicly addressed the reasonable ‘brain drain’ concern in these terms, arguing that just like skilled emigrants had long sent money back to their old home countries, Arkadian researchers would send back their findings to their old home planet.
The main difference between Viola and Robert, however, was that his perennial involvement in high-level discussions precluded him from having the luxury of trying to focus on the positives.
Two years had now passed since Robert’s unannounced and unexpected return to Earth, just one day before Arkadia’s initial launch, and there was no denying that he had aged far more visibly in this two-year period than any previous. He did all he could to clear his mind at the end of each day, and particularly ahead of happy events like the birthday they were all gathered to celebrate, but debates about the societal makeup of a wandering outpost central to humanity’s future were not debates which could be easily boxed off in a corner of his mind.
It wasn’t so much that Robert took his work home with him as it was that his work never left him, alternately following him around and consuming him like something between a rain cloud and a vice grip.
His decision to spend three years on Earth prior to his departure for Arkadia, one taken primarily so he could see Katie grow up, had made him something of a de facto ambassador, or at least a go-between in multi-party discussions involving interests based on Earth, Terradox and the Venus station.
The stresses of these endless high-level discussions, decisions and debates had been almost constant, and Robert Harrington had unquestionably borne the brunt.
In Viola’s regular contact with Nisha Kohli she’d heard similar sentiments about Chase — that recent years had taken a real toll.
Viola had repeatedly told Robert that his life would be easier if h
e stopped trying to please everyone at once with impossible and unworkable compromises. She told him that picking his battles and putting his foot down when necessary would stand him in good stead, but he had never had an easy time doing so.
“If an argument is worth having, it’s worth winning,” she had recently told him, “so if you fight on a hill, you have to be willing to die on it. If the outcome of a discussion is important, it’s not enough to go in to that discussion acting like you’re willing to give everything up if you don’t get your way — to get your way, you have to actually be willing to give everything up.”
In Viola’s eyes there wasn’t just nothing wrong with sticking to your guns when you were right; it was irresponsible not to do so. She was a very different person to Robert, though, and internally acknowledged that his less combative approach to emotive discussions was likely why his presence was requested at high-level meetings so much more frequently than her own.
What frustrated her and Robert equally was that major restrictions on romotech applications on Earth meant that some problems which could have been easily solved remained, due to somewhat understandable concerns about unintended side effects. The air was clean and the oceans were free of plastic, thanks to environmental applications which had been in place long before Morrison’s death and which had initially aided him greatly in winning the support of the masses; but after a few years of skepticism back in the days of the Terradox Colony, there was now a broad consensus that Earth’s main problem was a lack of approved romotech applications rather than a danger of too much.
Viola had used her loud voice to support calls for a rollback on restrictions which prevented the almost cost-free construction of homes in impoverished areas which could make a major and immediate difference to many people’s lives, as just one example.
Rusev’s decision to make her fortified algae formulation open-source had already had enormous effects, eliminating systemic and widespread hunger now that charity donations could be used remarkably efficiently by building communal dining machines, self-sustaining and algae-based, rather than providing individual meals or unreliable seeds. There was still a degree of skepticism and even snobbery around the algae on Earth, with many people seeing it as something for those who could afford nothing else. But those in real need saw their lives transformed as further innovations like drone deliveries enabled access to the dining machines’ meals even for those who lived too remotely to collect them from communal machines or for underground piping to be workable.
On that theme, towards the end of Patch’s party Peter had taken a small taste of some real lab-grown steak which Pavel had sourced and brought along for the occasion. Viola and Robert knew better than to touch it, and by nightfall Peter could only wish that he had shared their wisdom.
Because his body had grown so accustomed to the algae after more than a decade of nothing else, it had also grown decidedly unaccustomed to having to work extremely hard to take what it wanted from a piece of food and reject the rest.
No one really saw this as a negative of the algae, as Peter had felt fit and healthy every day since Rusev first showed him how to work an algae-based dining machine. Between retches over the toilet, he vowed to Viola that he would “stick to the green stuff” from then on.
Pale and weak, Peter was an unusually sorry sight as he climbed into bed that night. “This Arkadia place better be worth it,” he quietly sighed a few minutes later, only half seriously.
“It will be,” Viola replied, but Peter’s tired body was out for the count before she finished saying it.
She stayed awake for a while flicking through some news bulletins on the viewing wall, eventually settling on the only one she could find which wasn’t about Peter and Pavel’s bloody run-in with two foiled assassins the previous day. Its focus was hardly good news either, relaying a mass protest-turned-riot at a homeless encampment on the outskirts of New London.
Viola could only shake her head; all it would take was political authorisation, and more than enough new homes could be built in no time.
Holly wanted more humanitarian romotech on Earth, and Dimitar himself was equally keen. The only stumbling block, to everyone else’s frustration, came in the shape of the risk-averse and by-the-book government engineers who remained adamant that applying anything on Earth was a completely different kettle of fish than doing so in a controlled environment like Terradox.
Safety-first was fair enough, Viola thought, but for these people it seemed to be safety-only. And safety for who?
More applications would be authorised in time, the risk assessors insisted, but Viola wasn’t alone in starting to wonder just how much time was really necessary to give the go ahead for something as simple as a basic home-building program. She tried to put herself in the shoes of the poor who had spent the last two years hearing about a planet-sized world being fabricated in orbit while they spent their nights seeking shelter from the elements wherever they could find it.
I would be rioting, she thought. I’d maybe even be buying into those goddamn conspiracy theories.
From the ivory towers of political power, it was easy to say that the spread of beneficial romotech which would help Earth’s vast human population was coming “soon enough”.
But on the ground in New London, where reasonable people demanding fewer restrictions were being pushed towards extremism by irresponsible politicians and where the most disenfranchised were being radicalised by militant anti-Arkadians and their insane conspiracy theories, it was a lot more difficult to sleep easily at night.
Two weeks later
twelve
With his destination now mere minutes away, the hardest part of Chase Jackson’s journey to Arkadia had been the departure from Terradox.
Convincing Nisha that there was no need to worry had been a walk in the park compared to saying goodbye to his mother Jillian, whose reluctance to let him go made Chase wonder what it was going to be like in a year’s time when he left for good rather than four short weeks.
The journey itself had passed slowly, with very little to do and with the growing communications delay making live conversations with Nisha or anyone else on Terradox progressively more difficult.
During the early stages, Chase had watched with interest as Robert Harrington took to Earth’s airwaves to announce the publication of Arkadia’s codified constitution. This document, intended to lay out a sensible framework within which its future elected officials would operate, proved uncontroversial and was generally received very well.
Some questioned why Robert was delivering it rather than Viola, who had previously been the de-facto Earth-based spokesperson for Rusentra’s interest and the general Arkadia project. Robert addressed that point very openly, stating that she was understandably keen to keep a low profile while the security situation on Earth stabilised following a marked increase in threats and direct action by anti-Arkadian militants.
Inevitably, the politicians in various regions who had come to define themselves in opposition to Arkadia picked holes in the constitution wherever they could and attempted to generate outrage over what were truly minor gripes.
One piece of news used by some in an attempt to drum up discontent was that all successful applicants who had been selected for the one-way trip to Arkadia would be subject to a compulsory six-month ‘quarantine’ period.
Officially termed as a ‘probationary adjustment period’, the six months immediately before departure would see all future Arkadians live together in regional adjustment centres. Once there they would be subject to intensive observation during cooperative tasks of all kinds as well as more overt physical and psychological tests. They would also have no contact with the outside world, which was a condition in place to weed out those who didn’t fully appreciate the isolation and finality of the one-way trip they were signing up for.
Those who opted out prior to the adjustment period clearly didn’t have what it took and would have struggled to live harmoniously on Arka
dia, and in that regard the six-month period had proven its worth before it even began.
More difficult and sometimes highly uncomfortable decisions were required when it came to stipulating the physical and psychological requirements for would-be Arkadians, and the ruling out of anyone with a serious medical condition did not pass without criticism. Some went so far as to accuse the project’s planners of indulging in ‘backdoor eugenics’ claiming that in beginning a new society by excluding people with certain genes they were in effect excluding those genes from ever being present.
The question of meaningful evolutionary divergence among the breakaway society was one which would have no bearing for many generations, and as such it was one which received very little attention. The same rules that were already in effect on Earth regarding non-medical genetic intervention were firmly codified in Arkadia’s constitution with a minimum effective period of eighty years. Only at that point, once Arkadia was a tremendous distance from Earth, would the relevant clauses be open to democratic alteration by its citizens.
Another short clause regarding the protocols for dealing with persistently trouble-making citizens was also seized upon by anti-Arkadians, who had no problem stretching reality to the point of absurdity in claiming that the clause suggested such citizens could be placed in forced labour camps and imprisoned for life if they refused to do what they were told.
The truth of this matter was nothing of the sort in either case, of course, and Robert once again took to the airwaves to make this point.
“No one can take everything a society gives them and decide to opt out of giving anything back,” he said in one decisive TV appearance, which had since come to be seen as the point that he and everyone else involved in the Arkadia project decided to stop treating its detractors with kid gloves and start standing up for what they believed in. “And when I say this I want to be clear that we’re not talking about forcing people to work, we’re talking about requiring people to participate. Try not paying your taxes. What happens? If you try to fight it and don’t relent, you go to jail. There will be no taxes on Arkadia, just like on Terradox, but just like Terradox we are going to be very clear in stating that we won’t tolerate people trying to exploit the system and the hard work of those around them. The primary difference, of course, is that once we travel to Arkadia we will not be sending anyone back to Earth.
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