Terradox Beyond

by Craig A. Falconer

  Robert nodded in assent to agree that The Mound, constructed as an emergency refuge against atmospheric problems, could indeed be used to house those exposed to the mysterious pathogen. Somewhat ironically, any such quarantining would in effect be protecting the external environment from anything the exposed individuals may have been carrying, rather than the other way around, but no one was in much mood for irony.

  “But first we need to get them out,” Peter said. “Because V, as much as I can understand your first idea, we can’t even think about doing that. We need to get everyone out alive, and one thing Grav always talked about in any kind of hostage situation or other rescue scenario was mitigation before liberation. Romesh, you said the Analytics team are working on adding a whole lot of detail to the map you just put up. And Robert, surely you must be working on isolating individuals if they show any symptoms… in fact, is it feasible to give everyone in the BMC a security bubble like we had on Earth?”

  “Yes and no,” Robert said. “Well, just yes… but with no benefit. Those ‘bubbles’, the solo-spheres, can’t be counted on. They’re designed to protect the wearer from attacks, not toxins. What you definitely can’t count on is running inside the BMC without risking bringing the toxin back out with us. The logistics of this mean that it’s one case when you two can’t suit up and rush in, risking your lives but saving the day. Not this time.”

  Robert didn’t mean this in any pejorative sense, respecting the risks Peter and Viola had taken in the past. In their multiple misadventures of years gone by, this had tended to be the way things played out, but both could understand his explanation of the difference this time. They didn’t fully agree, but they saw where he was coming from.

  Young Bradley Reinhart, still huddled over his work console, raised a hand to beckon Romesh again while the others continued to talk.

  Peter was mulling something over and shared it before the thought had finished processing. “Once we have a secure pathway to The Mound, I’ll be willing to go in. I’ll go to quarantine with the others if that’s what it takes. If passing through ground zero isn’t going to work, what about going in from altitude and dropping through the BMC’s ceiling?”

  Robert appeared pensive for a few seconds until his attention was caught by Romesh’s suddenly animated expression at the other side of the room.

  “If someone can get me in the air and on the roof, I’ll gladly go down to lift people out from the inner sectors,” Peter continued.

  “We’ll go down to get people out,” Viola said.

  Peter narrowed his eyes. “You could barely lift Katie…”

  “I said get them out, not lift them out,” she replied. “There’s a lot more to this than physically removing people. Emotions will be running higher than you can imagine in there. Everyone will want to be taken out first, or to have their child taken out first. Even if everything else goes well and we’re able to go in, it’s not going to be eas—”

  “Guys,” Romesh called, encouraging the others towards Bradley’s work console. “This is the breakthrough. Peter, with this, we can mitigate.” Romesh immediately hurried towards the virtual screen he had earlier placed on the room’s largest wall and tapped a few options on his wristband to fill it with the all-important incoming data.

  Robert turned towards Romesh’s information-packed screen and nodded with determination. “Bradley, put a call out for someone who’s qualified enough and selfless enough to fly at altitude and hover over the BMC in the knowledge they’ll be quarantined afterwards for who-knows-how-long.” He turned to Viola, then Peter. “Because as soon as Romesh is finished mitigating, it’s time to start liberating.”

  thirty

  The wall-sized map Romesh Kohli stood before now displayed several new pieces of priceless information on each mapped individual, including an aggregate ’symptomatic’ score which estimated how affected each was by the toxins at the edge of the BMC. It was too early to discern exactly why certain people appeared more symptomatic than those alongside them in the same room, but Romesh and Robert both acted with enough confidence in the data that the others followed suit in taking it at face value.

  If there had been time to explain, Bradley would have relayed the information he’d been given by the Arkadia’s Analytics team, which explained that each individual’s wristband collected sufficient data to make such estimates. The aggregate score wasn’t calculated in isolation, of course, but rather by taking a reading of the individual’s current heart rate and temperature — as well as several other basic metrics — and comparing the recent changes in their data to the general average of everyone within the BMC. It was hoped that this comparative approach would account for stress-related changes, particularly when cross-referenced with each individual’s baseline readings and historic responses to stress. It was at times like this that the wristbands’ data monitoring came into their own, and the fact that all Arkadians who had been quarantined on Earth for six months prior to their arrival had worn their wristbands during that entire period meant there was plenty of data to be drawn upon.

  Visually, the pattern was obvious: individuals closest to the outer edges of the BMC were by and large the most symptomatic. The dots representing those within the ground zero sector were all blood red, while most of those representing people within Katie’s inner sector were emerald green.

  “This is what we thought,” Peter said, taking in the vast map and correctly assuming what it all meant. “But why are there a few people in the inner sectors with yellow and orange dots? Are they just more susceptible? Were they in ground zero when something happened?”

  Responding to this question with an action rather than offering a direct response, Romesh returned to Bradley Reinhart’s work console and commandeered it to make a request for the Analytics team to trace the generalised movement patterns of everyone trapped in the BMC to look for commonalities between those worst affected. In his mind, it made sense to think that those marked by yellow or orange dots had perhaps been in or near ground zero when the toxins initially emerged from the soil, and that they had made it deeper inside the BMC before any romotech barriers were put in place.

  One major positive for the group of observers was that toxicity levels did not appear to be rising noticeably within the BMC’s inner sectors, including the most central of all where Katie Ospanov and dozens of others were currently trapped. The same certainly couldn’t be said for ground zero, where things were looking graver and graver by the minute.

  “This last piece of data will be with us in a minute or two,” Romesh said, attempting to calm the impatience he expected to see when he turned back to the others. “And it’s going to help us majorly. But in the meantime… Bradley, have any pilots volunteered yet for the rescue mission?”

  Bradley shook his head. “It’s only been a minute, though.”

  “We don’t have a lot of minutes,” Romesh sighed, fiddling with his own wristband. “So, short of any other options…”

  “He’s going to ask Nisha,” Peter whispered to Viola.

  The only reason Romesh didn’t confirm that Peter was correct was that he didn’t hear his guess, and seconds later he was indeed speaking to his daughter and asking if she felt mentally up to a task she was highly trained to undertake and highly capable of successfully completing. “Peter and Viola will be right there with you, and this is the best chance we have of getting Vijay, Katie and everyone else out of there. The downside is that you’ll have to be quarantined with them in The Mound for an undetermined length of t—”

  “I’m in,” Nisha’s voice decisively boomed through her father’s wristband.

  Peter Ospanov pumped his fist and looked to the sky in thanks as though the mission was already complete. Accessing the inner sectors of the BMC from above would be possible for the same reason there was any problem in the first place; namely because the microspheres which divided Arkadia into confined atmospheric zones did not extend from the romosphere’s core to its outer cloak, as was
the case with Terradox’s fixed zonal divisions. Though no one mentioned it, there was more than a hint of irony in that fact that the cause of their problem could also enable the solution.

  “Nisha, get here now,” Romesh spoke into his wristband. “We need you.”

  Nisha replied with haste: “I’m on my way, and I’m not far.”

  For a few moments, silence circled. At last, it felt like progress was being made.

  “Romesh,” Robert began, “this map is live and fully reactive, correct? I can place a barrier exactly as I could from my own office?”

  “Absolutely. In fact, since you granted full permissions, I could do the same. Why, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that I don’t want to enact a full-scale lockdown across the whole of Arkadia,” Robert said, “but I’m also thinking that it’s too early to rule out the possibility of the toxin bleeding out. I want to place further ringed barriers around the whole BMC, and also to prepare the pathway for the rescue vehicle to carry survivors to The Mound. And again, I want that to be a thick barrier with multiple layers. Do you want to take care of that, or shall I?”

  “Go ahead,” Romesh said.

  And so Robert did, effortlessly placing romotech barriers with the mere drag of a finger. The others watched in amazement, all of them but Bradley having been around the inner circle for long enough to remember how much more difficult an undertaking the creation of such microspheric barriers had been during the dramatic incident in Terradox’s Little Venus zone which almost claimed Chase Jackson’s life among many others. It was Bo, currently hurtling towards an asteroid at Chase’s side, whose tireless work had enabled the first microspheres so many years ago, and his efforts were paying off even in his physical absence.

  “Shit,” Bradley cursed, recapturing everyone’s attention. “Uh, guys… the very worst hit people were all in ground zero at the same time, which is when the toxins breached the soil… if that’s even the right way to say it. Some of them are now further inside, as we can see. But the bad news is that there are people with yellow and orange dots who were nowhere near ground zero at the wrong time, but who have been in extended proximity to the red people who were.”

  “You’re not telling us it’s fucking contagious?” Peter grunted.

  “We still don’t really know what ‘it’ is,” Robert answered on Bradley’s behalf. “If it was a virus, this could be a sign that it was contagious. But it could be physical spores or… I don’t know… ‘residue’ on the skin or clothes of the carriers. It doesn’t mean that one person is passing an ‘infection’ that’s in them to someone else; it could just be that the cause of the infection is on them, if you follow my thought. Ultimately it doesn’t matter, because—”

  “No, it doesn’t matter,” Romesh interrupted. “With respect, Robert, right now it really doesn’t. What matters now, with this in mind, is decisively isolating the symptomatic from the healthy. I think we should communicate with them via the BMC’s PA system and try to herd people into groups based on their current readings, then place barriers between those groups. Is everyone in agreement? We’ll essentially be creating sectors within sectors, based on the currently available data.”

  Robert nodded, grateful rather than offended that Romesh had interrupted him. He announced more details of the plan as they came to him, beginning with the crucial point of sugarcoating reality to avoid carnage. If people knew why some of them were being grouped together, they wouldn’t cooperate, he reasoned. No one disagreed with his logic, or with the mild deception of the white lies that would be necessary for the greater good.

  Wasting no more time, he told Viola that she should be the one to make the initial public announcement. Everyone agreed with this — her voice would be the one most gladly received. He then told her exactly what to say, going so far as to digitally write it on one of the room’s empty walls so she wouldn’t forget the agreed-upon wording.

  While Viola steadied her voice to speak, everyone else gathered around Bradley to watch via the live video feed he had just pulled up. Although this was less informative than the previously displayed map in a data-driven sense, the expressions of helplessness and fear on the trapped individuals’ faces added a whole new dimension. None of them had heard from the outside since Robert first informed them of a “temporary and cautionary lockdown”, part of which involved a block on their wristbands’ incoming and outgoing communications ability. That decision hadn’t been taken lightly, and had only been taken at all on the basis that he wanted to avoid any panic on either side of the BMC’s barriers and to manage the way the situation was relayed rather than to let the story come out of its own accord. His idea had largely worked, since as it stood the Arkadian population at large didn’t know that anything was majorly wrong. Questions were being asked as to why no one in the BMC was reachable or trackable, but the fact that an infrastructure stress-test had been scheduled for the day explained this away in the minds of most Arkadians, who readily and automatically assumed it was all part of the test.

  Peter stood at Viola’s side and told her that she could do it and had done countless more difficult things in the past. His words didn’t apply any more pressure and did in fact serve their desired purpose, increasing her confidence.

  “Hi, everyone… this is Viola,” she said, swallowing away any last remaining doubts.

  The children whose faces were visible on the video feed all smiled instinctively at the welcome presence of a voice they knew so well. The adults, many of them those children’s parents, were clearly more cautious and hesitant to assume that any good news was coming.

  “We’ve identified the problem that popped up earlier, and we’re ready to start getting you out of there. For this to work smoothly, all we need is for everyone to pay attention to their wristbands and follow the personalised directions that come your way. There is logic behind where you’ll all be asked to stand, and the logic is to make sure we can get you all to safety as quickly and as efficiently as possible. I’m separated from Katie right now — and darling, we’re coming — and because of the way this is going to work, some of you might be separated from your friends or family for a very short time. It has to be this way, and you’re all going to get out of there before long. How long ‘before long’ actually is will depend partly on how closely you can all follow these instructions, okay? So please, do what your wristbands say. Whoever you can see now, you’ll still be able to see. But we will be placing temporary romotech barriers across areas of each room to divide you into the groups we need you in. There’s no time to explain everything right now but everyone is getting out of there, and I’ll see you all soon. Peter and I are coming to get you, personally, and this is all going to be over soon. Stay strong.”

  “Perfect,” Robert said, apparently glad rather than merely indifferent that Viola had gone off-script to add conversational and repetitive touches at certain stages of the announcement.

  Bradley was already at work sending out messages directly to countless wristbands with instructions on where people should stand. At Romesh’s request he also asked people to stay several feet apart from each other, stressing that this applied to parents and their children as much as it did to everyone else.

  Robert watched Romesh’s wall map like a hawk and began to place microspheric romotech barriers between the newly emergent groups, further protecting those currently represented by green dots and perhaps further damning those represented by red.

  Minutes later, everyone inside the BMC had followed the personalised directions on their wristbands and made their way to the specified area of the room they were already in, further compartmentalising the giant live map. It was an odd thing to see: the dots in the rooms generally got redder as they got further from the BMC’s centre and closer to ground zero, but within each other zone there were concentrations of each colour in varying proportions.

  While Katie Ospanov, Patch Hawthorne, Vijay Kohli and most other children were in the safest sector o
f the BMC, even their central room contained several orange dots. No one in their room was red, at least, but everyone understood that the data readings weren’t static. With this in mind, Romesh and Robert worked to ensure that anyone who reached a ‘symptomatic’ score worthy of a red dot would be automatically isolated by the creation of new barriers within the existing divisions. This additional last-ditch safeguard to protect others was why everyone in the BMC had been asked to stay at least a few feet apart — just enough for a barrier to be automatically placed between them should the need arise.

  The door of the Shipyard’s communications office swung open fiercely, startling everyone until their surprise turned to relief that Nisha was here and looked like she meant business.

  “Let’s do this,” she said.

  Relief faded from Robert Harrington as it sunk in that Viola really was about to voluntarily enter the BMC. He attempted to look calm for her sake and wished her well, along with the equally brave and arguably foolhardy Nisha and Peter.

  Romesh told Nisha that he would see her soon and didn’t expect the necessary post-rescue quarantine period to be too long, based on what he’d heard from the teams in Botany and Analytics. More information on the mutated plants responsible for the ongoing chaos was coming in all the time, and as it did Robert began calling upon his Habitat Management experience to gradually amend conditions within the worst-hit sectors in an attempt to eliminate the toxin or at least weaken its effects.

  Romesh’s experience with his ill-fated Nancy project assisted in this endeavour, which both men had been discussing intently prior to Nisha’s arrival. The previously mooted option of starving the toxin of oxygen no longer seemed as inherently dangerous to the people in the sectors in question as it had at the time, following assurance from some leading Arkadian botanists that dropping oxygen levels to the borderline of human safety could prove sufficient due to what they could gather about the plants’ unusual mutations. As had been made only too obvious during the rescue mission Peter and Viola carried out along with Holly inside Terradox’s Isolation Kompound, however, the pace of change to the oxygen levels an individual was exposed to played a part almost as important as the raw percentage of atmospheric oxygen, and for this reason Robert wasn’t sure such an approach would work. He hoped that slowly reducing the atmospheric oxygen in ground zero in particular could at least arrest the worsening of the health of those trapped within that sector by weakening the toxin, but he feared that going at a pace safe enough to avoid hypoxia-like symptoms would be too slow to prevent those in question from succumbing to their existing symptoms. Time was ticking, and rescue from above certainly appeared to be everyone’s best option.