He made a mental note to remember to thank her.
In a TE-900 that was significantly lighter than when it set off, Chase prepared for his final drop-off of the day. Before too long he landed next to a fairly nondescript security centre which would soon be run by the ultra-capable Peter Ospanov, then stepped out to place his final canaries in the waiting cage.
But as soon as he stepped out, he stepped back in.
Behind him, the canaries chirped unhappily until the door had been re-closed for several seconds. Chase got ready to open the door again as a test, holding his nose in anticipation of the offensive smell that had caught he and the birds by surprise last time.
Sure enough, the opening of the door agitated them greatly once again.
With his suspicion confirmed, Chase closed the door and used his wristband to call Rachel.
“Hey, stranger,” she answered. “Is that you done at last? I got on fine with the telescope. I mean, I’ve been to Terradox and back a few times since then, but I’m here now.
“That’s great,” he mumbled uneasily, humour the last thing on his mind. “But listen, I need you to come out to the security centre, where I am now. Come in the Wasp.”
“What?” Rachel asked, her tone falling very suddenly. “You want me to fly the Wasp all the way out there? Why?”
“It’s just…”
Momentarily stuck for words, Chase Jackson took a look around. His eyes searched fruitlessly for an explanation outside before settling back on the uncomfortable canaries.
“Rachel,” he gulped. “I don’t know what it is, but something’s definitely not right…”
fifteen
By the time Rachel arrived at the security centre — no short trip from Arkadia Central Station — Chase had made a degree of progress.
Having driven slowly around the security centre in search of a clue, he eventually spotted a small group of around ten weak-looking bush-like plants growing in the shadow of one side of the building, under a low overhanging ledge. He opened the door briefly, and was absolutely positive that the odour was indeed stronger here than it had been from further away.
The canaries reached new levels of noise, all but sealing it.
Those plants?, he thought, still doubting their collective conclusion. Really?
Chase let Rachel know about this when the Wasp came into view, using their new-generation wristbands’ flawless communications ability to loop her in.
He described the smell as overpowering, like a remarkably intense version of the kind of odour that might be emitted from the inside of a recently-snapped flower stem. He told her that what troubled him most of all wasn’t so much the smell itself, however, but rather the very presence of unexpected plants in this area.
Chase left his TE-900 when the Wasp touched down, promising the increasingly agitated canaries that he’d be back soon, then ran over to climb in. He signalled for Rachel to hold her nose while he ran, and she was happy to oblige.
Once he was inside the two-seater Wasp, she lowered her hand from her nose and almost vomited at the lingering smell that had crept in with Chase.
“Told you,” he said. “But apart from knowing that those things stink like high hell, I’m stumped.”
Rachel pinched her nose with her fingers again. “Come on, Chase,” she said, her voice nasal thanks to the placement of her fingers, “your dad is a botanist. Your dad is the botanist! You must know something about plants?”
Chase upturned his palms. “I don’t even know why we need these plants. We don’t need them for oxygen and we don’t need them for food. They don’t even look good. Why are they here at all? Any ideas?”
“No happy ones,” Rachel said while fiddling with her wristband. “Okay… I’ve engaged my protective cloak and I think you should do the same. We’re too close to those things.”
“My cloak? Why?”
“Because they could be poisonous. Wait… you haven’t touched any of them, have you?”
Chase shook his head, thankful to be able to do so truthfully. “But why would they even be here if they were poisonous?” Chase asked, voicing the obvious question while nevertheless following her advice.
“That’s the thing,” Rachel replied, taking an easy step towards the plants. “Something tells me they’re not supposed to be.”
Even with his cloak now protecting him from further exposure to any potential pathogens, Chase Jackson’s instinctive reaction to the suggestions that the plants before him shouldn’t have been before him was to back away. “We’ve been breathing the air,” he said. “I’ve been here for an hour, right beside them. Why the hell… how the hell… I mean… just… what do you mean they’re not supposed to be here? We created this place from scratch! Are you saying someone has messed with the embryonic code?”
“I didn’t mean anything like that,” Rachel stressed, walking to Chase’s side and leaning back against the Wasp in an effort to convince him both that she meant what she was saying and that she didn’t think there was anything to worry about. “The cloaks are a sensible precaution until we get some data back, but I’m willing to bet that the data will tell us these things’ seeds were blown here by the wind. I didn’t mean they shouldn’t be here as in Arkadia, I meant here as in here. There’s hardly any light where they are, for one thing, and this doesn’t look like the specially engineered growing soil we normally use these days.”
Chase visibly relaxed. “I guess the shape of those rocks means that stuff blowing in the wind could gather here. But when do you think we’ll have some data to confirm your theory?”
“As soon as we gather a sample and take it back to the Karrier,” she said. “There’s a basic sample collector in the Wasp’s field kit.”
“I’ll get the kit,” Chase said.
“And the sample?”
Chase glanced at the plants then back to Rachel. He pointed towards them with a grin on his face. “Well, I really wouldn’t mind if you want to be the one to take the lead…”
They both laughed, breaking a tense atmosphere as Chase went back inside the Wasp to fetch its field kit. He emerged quickly in a light EVA suit, not surprising Rachel with what she considered a sensible abundance of caution, then proceeded to gather samples from two of the plants — one that looked healthy and one that was evidently dying. Chase was glad that the kit’s extendable ‘grabber’ allowed him to do this without his glove having to touch the potentially poisonous plant, and even more so that the sample containers could be placed directly in the Karrier’s bio-chemical analysis unit without having to be opened. That apparatus was designed for safely analysing even potent biohazards, so was more than sufficient for the task at hand.
After gathering some soil from around the out-of-place plants, Chase placed all three sealed containers in his Wasp and took off his EVA suit.
“I’m going to call my dad on the way back and tell him to expect some data soon,” he called out to Rachel. Rather than fly back together and leave one Wasp out in the open, they had naturally opted to each fly one of the vehicles.
She gave him a thumbs up. “I’ll talk to Robert Harrington and tell him the same thing. We might as well have a team on Earth look over this too, right?”
“We don’t report to anyone on Earth,” Chase said, using a neutral but decisive tone. “We’ll send the data to the colony and see what comes back. If this went to Earth, there would always be the risk of someone blowing it out of all proportion and making it sound like we’ve found something really bad. I’m not talking about whitewashing anything, we just need to make sure the right people do the analysis. Does that make sense?”
“Understood,” Rachel replied. “I’ll see you back at the Karrier. Don’t go slow for my benefit… just get back as quick as you can so we can get those samples checked.”
Chase followed Rachel’s suggestion, glad to hear it, and sped off as fast as the Wasp would take him.
He wasted no time in sending a voice message to his father, not even t
hinking about what hour it would be on Terradox and what Christian might be doing. His words would travel from his Wasp to the Karrier then ultimately across a vast expanse of space until reaching Christian’s wristband on Terradox. In one ironic sense, the total effortlessness of this long-distance communication made the unavoidable delay feel more pronounced than may have been the case if it required more cumbersome steps.
After Chase sent some photographs to Christian along with a voice message which included a breakdown of what he’d found and the coordinates of where he’d found it, the long flight back to the Karrier and the communications delay gave him more than enough time to think about the wider issues raised by the discovery. He agreed with Rachel that there was almost definitely nothing to be concerned about in direct relation to the plants, but the delay in having this confirmed was a point of mild concern in and of itself.
For while Chase and Rachel had each been able to surround themselves with a protective cloak, they would have been physically unable to isolate a large area around the plants without approval from Terradox. Small matters like the placement of cloaks would not require such approval once Arkadia was fully staffed and on its way — its Habitat Management team would enjoy full autonomy in that regard — but large-scale modifications would be dependent on external approval.
More precisely, larger modifications would be dependent on passive approval. The essence of this necessary safeguard was that any major change orchestrated from Arkadia, such as a modification to the romosphere-wide seasonal weather system or a moderate change in its direction of travel, could be halted by Rusentra liaison teams on both Earth and Terradox within twenty-four hours of its execution. The liaison teams had essentially been granted veto power over anything which could potentially cause lasting problems, to guard against the minuscule but non-negligible prospect that control of Arkadia could one day be hijacked from within.
The bitter experience of David Boyce’s weaponisation of Netherdox and his attempted takeover of the now-defunct Terradox Resort lived long in the memory of all who had witnessed it, and the mark those events had made on the public psyche ensured that the sensible safeguards put forward to prevent any kind of repeat were universally well received.
The reason a veto-style passive authorisation model was chosen was simple: the alternative model, requiring active authorisation from the liaison teams, would have run the risk of leaving the Arkadian population impotent to make any major changes should any unfortunate circumstances render those teams unable to accede. Rusentra’s best minds had taken great pains to ensure that the veto safeguards could not be overridden, principally by placing Arkadia’s primary control transceiver in an insulated chamber within the reactor at the romosphere’s core — the one place where it could absolutely not be tampered with.
A reply from Christian came at last as Chase raced over the landscapes that had stunned him on his first flight in the other direction but had passed with barely a downward glance on the return leg.
“No plants were supposed to be growing in that spot,” Christian’s message began, very matter-of-factly and without so much as a hello, “but after looking at some historic wind patterns I can hazard a pretty good guess that the seeds were blown there, like you thought. They look young and starved of light, which is no surprise. The overhanging rocks blocked that spot from our cloak-cams, so obviously they’ve also been responsible for a lack of sunlight that has caused the seeded plants to struggle. As for the smell you described… I wouldn’t want to make any guesses. There’s nothing to worry about, but until I see the sample data there’s not much else I can say. Send me the data ASAP and I’ll see what we’re looking at.” In the meantime, Christian’s message continued with some general questions about Arkadia with a particular interest in how the trees near the Shipyard were doing.
“Everything is growing unbelievably well,” Chase replied when the message came to an end. “Unbelievably big.”
Meriting the repetition, ‘unbelievably’ was most certainly a suitable word. Because even though Chase vaguely understood the new technology which allowed the rapid growth and cultivation of targeted plants, it was something else entirely to see it in action. As he understood it, a microsphere — more commonly known as a bubble — could be placed around a small group of trees or plants who could then be exposed to an isolated atmosphere fine-tuned for their optimal and expedited development. Within a distinct microsphere no wider than a large swimming pool, the day-night cycle experienced by the plants it housed could be greatly shortened with no ill-effects. Along with the ability to speed up the apparent passage of seasons and to engineer soil for optimal nutrition, the conditions were conducive for truly optimal and extremely rapid growth.
Christian Jackson’s microsphere-based growing experiments within his Botanical Gardens on Terradox, the success of which had led to these breakthroughs, had captured a level of public interest far above anything normally seen for botanical research. This was largely because of the tremendous visual impact of an image showing two plants which had been grown just a few metres apart and separated only by the invisible ‘wall’ of a microsphere; a microsphere which enabled the plants on the inside to mature and flower within a fraction of the time it took for those on the outside.
There was certainly a lot more going on than seasonal weather manipulation and lighting modifications, including the high-level genetic engineering which enabled seeds to respond so well to these deliberate atmospheric variations in the first instance. At the end of the day, though, everyone knew that it was the variations that made the difference.
Christian would never see the Arkadian forests with his own eyes, but he took pride in the fact that his research had played a central part in bringing them into existence.
And although his father sounded entirely confident that nothing was wrong, Chase Jackson dearly hoped that Christian hadn’t accidentally introduced something unplanned.
Shortly after arriving back at the Karrier, Chase received a new message from Christian passing on a request from Holly to send mapping drones out across Arkadia to check that no more errant plants were growing on any other small patches of ground out of the cloak-cams’ sight.
He waited for Rachel to arrive before readying the drones, and fortunately she wasn’t far behind him.
It had started to get dark outside, prompting Chase to ask if someone on Terradox could give them a few more hours of sunlight so he could give Rachel a quick tour of Arkadia’s incredible sights while they waited for some meaningful information on the plants. He wanted to explore more of the landscape himself, too, but didn’t think it was fair for Rachel to have come all this way and not catch a glimpse of the picturesque beach.
The answer was no, somewhat frustratingly but not at all surprisingly. The day-night cycle couldn’t be changed so drastically without potentially damaging effects on open-air plant life, Christian said, and there was no room for argument.
What proved a lot more than somewhat frustrating was the length of time it took for any further update on the plant analysis to come through. The primary data was all visible to Chase and Rachel but it meant nothing to their botanically inexperienced eyes, leaving them in the dark.
When two mapping drones reported the discovery of plants in other unexpected locations, Christian reacted quickly by informing them that they would need to spend the night on Arkadia. He stressed that the continued analysis wasn’t a sign of a problem and nor was the discovery of two more small groups of plants, but that his team simply needed more time. He told Chase that he would need to go back out and fetch samples from the two new sites in the morning, and encouraged him to again wear his EVA suit — “to err on the safe side.”
Chase was pleased to hear this, granting as it did permission for another day of aerial exploration. Rachel didn’t take the news of the drones’ new discoveries quite so well but tried to accept Christian’s insistence that the plants’ presence wasn’t necessarily a sign of any underlying proble
m.
She fell asleep long before Chase when night came, and he opted to leave her be even when the reassuring news came in from Terradox that their initial theory was correct: the plants had indeed been seeded by wind and failed to thrive due to a lack of both direct sunlight and access to the right kind of engineered soil.
“This is nothing serious but we’re very glad you noticed it,” Christian said. “Everyone here has been praising your thoroughness in finding those first plants. We’d still like you to gather further samples in the morning and after that we’re going to fabricate microspheres around the out-of-place plants to expedite their deaths and make sure they don’t spread any further. Because of your discovery we’re also going to place partial cloaks around all plants which could be seeded elsewhere by wind, so this won’t happen again.”
Chase wasn’t altogether sure why Christian and his team were simultaneously keen to stress that out-of-place plants posed no danger but also that steps were being taken to make sure the same thing would never happen again. He knew he would get better and clearer answers when he was back on Terradox and could converse with them without having to contend with a communications delay, though, so he contently settled down at the end of a long and unforgettable day.
With Rachel having fallen asleep so long before him it didn’t surprise Chase to find her awake and ready to leave when he rose the next morning.
“Good timing,” she said when he wandered in to the analysis centre. “I was going to give you five more minutes.”
“I guess you’ve spoken to my dad?”
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