by Tara Basi
As a three-dimensional digital exercise it was a perfectly self-contained eco-system, an idealised chocolate box of the best Earth had to offer. What remained of the human race would be travelling in style to Eden.
Apart from a Block Van arriving every two weeks to collect their blood, they had heard nothing more from Eva. Mina found it frustrating; they had a lot of questions for her which arose every day. At one of their now regular meetings Mina asked Anton for an update.
“I think the flow of little Blocks to the Ark is slowing. It’s been like a bee hive for weeks.”
“Trinity can you try raising Eva again? We need to know what’s going on and what the hell to do with the plans for the Ark interior.”
“No one’s home as usual. Wait. Wait. Eva’s calling.”
Mina was taken completely by surprise as the giantess burst onto the screen.
“The pods are in place. Send your data for the indoctrination.”
Eva was back in her cloak and she looked calm. Mina wanted to think that was a good sign.
“How many?”
“Is there more than one indoctrination algorithm?” Eva asked, as her mask of calmness started to slip.
“We want to know how many are safely in the Ark?”
Eva didn’t look as if she would be patient much longer. “What is an Ark?”
“We call the factory ‘the Ark’ and the destination planet ‘Eden’. We’re asking how many people have you recovered and placed in pods, inside the Ark? Are they all well?”
Eva groaned, before recovering some of her composure. “Do not invent new terms without defining them first. This language is already very difficult for me. Fifty-seven million. They are all healthy. Why would we waste pods on unhealthy specimens? Give me the indoctrination.”
Mina didn’t know if she should be happy or cry. It was more souls than they had been expecting to save. God knows what Eva’s definition of unhealthy was. “We might be able to help with the sick.”
“That phase is complete. There is no time. The indoctrination.”
Mina wanted to curse Eva’s brutality. Instead, she held her tongue. “Trinity is sending you our detailed plans for the Ark interior, the supplies we want loaded along with all the technical details and location coordinates you will need.”
“The indoctrination data,” Eva repeated.
“Why is that urgent? It will run for only a month. Constructing the Ark interior will need nearly all the time we have left. That’s what your projections told us.”
Eva roared so loudly that Mina fell off her chair in shock. The alien didn’t speak. She paced back and forth flexing her muscles and occasionally growling. Finally, she came to a halt with her back to the screen and appeared to be trying to calm herself. Her back muscles rippled and contracted like tensely coiled snakes. She slowly turned back and spoke. “The Ark plans are satisfactory. Work will commence immediately. I require the indoctrination data urgently.”
Mina was now very suspicious. It made no sense for Eva to want the indoctrination data so soon. She made a decision. “It will be supplied when we pass through the Travel-Way. One month later you can wake the population.”
Eva snarled at her, unsheathed a battle-axe and ran towards the screen seemingly intent on leaping through it and hacking Mina to death. Involuntarily Mina scrambled backwards as fast as she could, crashing into the chairs behind her. At the last moment Eva somehow stopped herself and dropped the axe. The loud crash made Mina jump again. “Very well. Anything else?” Eva snarled.
Mina decided that for whatever reason they had the upper hand and she had no idea how long it would last. It needed to be exploited. “We want regular access to the Ark. To see for ourselves the pods and the changes to the interior.”
Eva’s glacial eyes bored holes in Mina’s head. “Come in the transport that collects your blood every fourteen days. You can tour the Ark. When we are not engaged in conversation this link will give you access to a live view inside the Ark which can be manipulated as you wish. There is nothing to hide. Consider. I’m already taking blood in large quantities. Channels are breeding. If you were very stupid, you might think I no longer needed you. Those in the pods already produce poor quality Crimson which will only deteriorate further as they age. If you do not breed and breed profusely I will fail the Shard. If I release them without proper indoctrination your species will likely be unhappy and revert to their natural savagery and the population will be ravaged. It might never recover. Do not provoke me again.”
With that Eva was gone.
Mina had only seen a Block Van when Harder had used one to ferry them back to their transport after the failed attack on the Iowa Block. At the time she hardly noticed it or remembered much about their short journey. Now she remembered a few details. It was a featureless slate oblong about the size of a small truck. Much smaller than the Bricks that had ferried the Blocks’ products through the old gateway that the Small Business had destroyed. It was obvious to Mina that Tress, Battery Boy and even Jugger were anxious about approaching the strange Block vehicle. As expected, Jugger wasn’t willing to risk Pinkie and Junior taking the trip to see progress with the Ark for themselves. Mina was nervous about what they might find. Her Block memories were terrible. She wasn’t looking forward to going back inside one. Stuff seemed unable to decide. He had accompanied them as far as the Van itself but still hadn’t committed himself to coming. Racing ahead was Nurse Trinity, who was carrying a medical box with their biweekly blood donation. The rear wall of the Van dilated and disappeared as Trinity approached revealing a featureless interior. Mina was surprised, there weren’t even seats. Without pausing Trinity ran inside, laid the box on the floor against the back wall and exited to stand next to the others on the pad.
Mina looked around. It had been some time since she had been outside. Preparing the Ark plans with Anton had consumed her for weeks. In the distance the big yellow robots were still tending to the park, keeping the grass trimmed and the shrubbery under control. It was a lovely day. Mina saw no point in delaying. This is what she’d asked Eva for: regular tours of the Ark. She stepped inside and took a seat on the floor with her back braced tightly against the wall. It was going to be a very rough ride without anything to hold on to. After a momentary hesitation Tress, Battery Boy and Jugger followed. “Are you coming Stuff?” Mina asked.
The boy chewed his lower lip and appeared to consider carefully before nodding and running after them. “Do you think we’ll see any pigs?” Stuff asked.
Mina could only shrug. Trinity walked away from the rear of the Van and returned to the base. The missing wall reappeared. Battery Boy and Stuff took seats on the floor and braced themselves. Tress and Jugger didn’t bother. They both leant casually against a wall. “Shouldn’t you sit down?” Mina asked, worried that with nothing to hold on to they would be thrown around the Van as it took off and accelerated.
“It’s not like ours. You’ll see,” Tress answered.
And it wasn’t. For many minutes she sat on the floor tensed and waiting for the Van take-off but nothing happened. Then the walls became transparent and she screeched. Jugger and Tress lost their casual air and fell to the floor in shock. Stuff covered his head with his hands and cried out in terror. They were racing through the sky at an incredible speed. Thick clouds flew by underneath the Van, and occasionally parted to reveal countryside, towns and cities that all looked much as they did before the Blocks. Closer inspection would have revealed the steady decay of humanity’s creations. Nature was reasserting itself. There was no vibration or a sound to indicate that they were flying. Mina was struck dumb. This was the technology Eva thought was primitive?
“I’ve never seen a Van do this before,” Tress said, tentatively pressing her hand against the invisible wall.
Stuff was slowly beginning to unwrap his head like a frightened turtle emerging from its shell. “Wow.” And after another minute, “This is great.”
Gradually they all grew accustomed to
the view and were starting to enjoy the sights when the Ark appeared on the horizon and raced towards them across the grasslands of Iowa. Stuff might have christened it the Ark, but it still looked like a Block. The same Block they had tried to attack only a month ago. Bad memories accumulated as their Van imperceptibly slowed and joined a queue of its bigger brothers, huge Bricks, descending towards one end of the Block roof. At the other end a constant stream of Bricks were exiting and flying away in every direction. Mina wondered if they were ferrying in raw materials for construction and the supplies they had requested.
Only a couple of metres separated the front of their Van from the Brick ahead and the one behind as they accelerated towards the opening in the roof. There was still no sensation of movement and the floor was always horizontal and the visible walls were always vertical. Mina tensed as they passed into the Block airlock, remembering how Grain had nearly been decapitated when they’d tried to hitch a ride on a Brick entering Block Seven. She gasped out loud as the Van exited the internal airlock and entered the Block proper. There was no shaft as there had been in Block Seven and maybe once had been in the Iowa Block. The whole interior of the Block, their Ark, was visible and it was a single vast space. More than a hundred thousand cubic kilometres. It wasn’t empty, everywhere Mina looked there was inexplicable activity. Millions and millions of Crawlers, Eva’s janitors, moved across the space like flies on a corpse, dodging legions of rising and falling Bricks. And there were other things. Gigantic cubes that extruded complete structures as they moved across invisible floors. They vaguely reminded Mina of impossibly large 3D printers. Printers capable of reproducing whole cities? Is this how the factory would make their Ark? Print it?
Their Van gracefully slipped past all the activity and headed straight for the Ark floor. It passed through into a quiet and dimly lit space only five metres high but covering the whole of the Block floor. Five-thousand square kilometres. The Van had come to a halt. It took a while for Mina’s eyes to adjust to the light. She found herself pressing against the invisible Van wall, straining to see. Gradually shapes came into view. It was an astonishing sight, reminding Mina of an ancient Chinese terracotta army. Row upon row of silvery grey pods stretched in every direction in perfect lines. Millions and millions of pods. The last of their race. And all of them were her responsibility.
“There’s so many,” Tress whispered.
“Not as many as there were, not by a long way,” Mina answered.
“Can we see the pigs now?” Stuff asked, apparently bored by the view of the endless grey pods.
Mina had a terrible desire to slap the little boy.
Tress intervened before she succumbed. “No. Have some respect. Those are our people down there.”
“People, inside those silver things? Are they alright?” Stuff said, studying the view more closely.
Mina softened. She smiled at Stuff. She kept forgetting he was still so young, barely twelve. “Yes, they’re fine. We’ll wake them up when the Ark’s ready and we’re on our way to Eden.”
“We hope they’re fine, we’ll only know for sure when they wake up,” Battery Boy said.
Jugger nodded in agreement, “At least Eva isn’t lying about the pods. There’s nothing more to see here. I want to get back.”
Mina didn’t disagree and she knew Jugger didn’t like being apart from Pinkie and Junior for too long. The question was, how were they supposed to tell the Van? Eva had implied that she was the Ark Boss, a horrible title, but maybe it had some perks. “Take us back to New York.”
There was no sense of motion. Only the view changed as they turned and flew back up through the Ark and a blizzard of moving parts. Within the hour the Van had deposited them all in the Park and then left, still carrying the box of blood Trinity had deposited earlier.
Months and a further year disappeared too quickly and then it was time to leave. And they had needed every moment of that time to complete the indoctrination algorithms. It wasn’t too complicated to develop common and tailored educational programmes that were aligned to an individual’s talents, based on fairly standard brainwave analysis, and their age. Apportioning roles and professions across the older ones so they would have a working society on day one turned out to be far more difficult than she had imagined. To do that, they first had to decide on a constitution, an economic framework, a political system and a judicial regime for the Ark. Then, the culture, values and ethics. And so it went, on and on. If they pulled on the political string, the economic model they had been working on collapsed. And everything had to be run through a simulation, over and over again to test the robustness of their choices. It led to regular arguments.
There was Jugger’s constant, unhelpful assertion that, “We’re the Bosses, right?” would resolve all issues.
Stuff would unhelpfully ask the most difficult of questions at the worst possible time. “What’s money?”
“Explain politics again,” was a common plea from almost everyone who’d only experienced a Block life.
It was Battery Boy who helped Mina and Anton break the logjam of conflicting opinions and options. “It’s only a starting point. Before we reach Eden, everything will have changed, won’t it? The people will decide.”
That comment helped Mina and Anton focus on creating a strong and flexible societal model without trying to make it perfect and all encompassing. The Ark society was bound to evolve, for better or worse, during their five-year voyage to Eden. The only thing she’d agreed with Anton at the outset was not to bring religion in to it. She stuck to that idea without asking the Block generation. Not involving them also avoided another round of excruciating and unanswerable questions from Stuff.
Even Jugger was happy with their final choices when he’d worked it out. “So I can run for Ark President? Great, then I’d be the Boss.”
Eva’s legions of Crawlers, the myriad of Bricks and the giant cubes inside the Ark had been very efficient. Whenever they weren’t working on the education programme, Mina and the others spent hours watching the Ark habitat take shape. Cities were spewed out and laid as if they were on a roll of three-dimensional wallpaper with every texture, colour and detail of the originals faithfully reproduced. Except that it was all perfect. Brand new. It took some getting used to. Mina kept thinking their new world looked more and more like a gigantic theme park every day. She comforted herself with the thought that once the millions were revived it would look more lived in and homely. Impossibly, the rural landscape was being reproduced in the same way, though it appeared entirely natural. Eva informed Mina that the wildlife and livestock were being kept in hibernation and would be awakened and released around the same time as the pods were emptied.
They saw less and less of Eva and she wasn’t missed. The call they had been expecting finally arrived as the Ark neared completion.
Eva didn’t appear very happy. She looked like she hadn’t been killing enough cyborgs lately. “Are the indoctrination algorithms ready, and the distribution map for the population?”
The few times they had spoken it was always the same question, this time Mina’s answer was different. “Yes, they’re both ready.”
Eva almost smiled, “Give them to me.”
Mina baulked. “We agreed, after we’ve passed through the gateway.”
Eva growled, “It is a Travel-Way. I will need five days to process the data and load the programmes into the pods and then they’ll take thirty days to run. Give them to me now, we leave in five days.”
Mina thought that seemed a little too convenient. “Five extra days, after we pass through the gateway isn’t a problem. Are we really leaving in five days?”
“Yes. Truculent’s two years are almost up. Why would I lie?” Eva yelled, before disconnecting.
Mina knew it would be soon. Even so it hit her hard. They were actually leaving Earth.
On the day, and quite unremarkably, a dull Van collected them and their personal belongings. It was bright and sunny. There was nothing i
n the weather to suggest the world was mourning their imminent departure. Everyone climbed aboard quietly and without fuss as though they were off to a funeral. Even Nurse Trinity was respectfully silent and still. Mina had substantially upgraded the chips in the little robot’s head and shoehorned additional processing capacity inside its body cavities. The robot body could now leave the base without limiting Trinity’s intellectual abilities. Trinity’s clone was staying behind to keep the base ticking over in case they ever needed it again. Mina didn’t want to admit, even to herself, that they were never coming back.
They flew in silence to the Ark. Mina couldn’t imagine any of the others would really miss the Earth they’d grown up in, a world dominated by the Blocks. Maybe they’d miss the base and their time in New York. She would miss Earth desperately; it was her world. She remembered it as it was before the Blocks. Imperfect and wonderful; with a history of achievement and darkness that stretched back millions of years. The pod people would have a good grounding in world history. And they’d collected inside the Ark everything ever written, recorded or filmed. Along with as much of humanities’ cultural heritage as she could collect. Maybe it would be enough and no one would ever forget the Earth.
The Van took them to an observation deck Anton had designed for the Ark roof. It was a spectacular edifice. He wanted a place people could go outside and see the heavens and know there was more to the universe than the inside of a Block. Still no one spoke. Except of course for Trinity who always seemed to know when the mood needed lifting.
