Terradox Reborn

by Craig A. Falconer

  The colony’s planners had wrestled with the need to maintain up-to-date health records for all colonists in the least invasive way possible, and the decisions they ultimately made required an interpretation of the word ‘invasive’ which Viola considered interchangeable with ‘inconvenient’. She agreed that weekly or even daily doctor’s visits would have been unworkable, but that didn’t mean that she thought her smart toilet’s automatic testing mechanisms fell on the right side of the invasiveness line.

  A fingerprint sensor on the flush button ensured that all data was recorded in the appropriate digital file, and Viola’s — like every other female colonist’s — included one important data point more than Peter’s.

  In the colony’s eighteen months of existence so far, no one on Terradox had fallen pregnant. Another year remained until the first parenting window would open, but Viola and Peter hadn’t yet discussed their plans, or lack thereof. A year was a long time, and the most important thing was that they understood the stakes in the meantime: anyone who did fall pregnant would be asked to return home to Earth with no prospect of ever regaining their place in the colony. On Viola and Peter’s wedding day, Holly had taken the opportunity to remind the newly married couple that there really could be no exceptions to this rule, even for them, since the policy had been set in stone by the wider Rusentra board.

  In this regard, pregnancy was considered a disqualifying health condition rather than a disciplinary matter; but given that no one had been pregnant when they arrived and that their status couldn’t change without someone else’s input, both partners would face the same consequence.

  When a social planner suggested what he considered an obvious safeguard in the form of temporary sterilisation, Ekaterina Rusev shot the idea down in no uncertain terms; because to her mind and many others’, memories of Roger Morrison’s eugenicist plot were far too fresh for any such moves to be encouraged. So strong was Rusev’s concern that applicants for the colony’s tremendously limited research placements might undergo an elective sterilisation procedure to improve their chances of being selected, she announced that anyone who did so after her first call for applications would be automatically discounted from consideration.

  Further medical tests were administered automatically each time a toilet’s flush button was pressed, with the only actively participatory test required of colonists being a finger-prick blood test on a small device next to the bathroom sink and directly in front of a set of electronic scales. The personalised nutritional profiling of the algae delivery system ensured that very few colonists ever veered too far from their ideal weight, and the permissible bounds were relatively generous.

  For each and every test, the acceptable results were identical to those required to travel to Terradox in the first instance. This meant that if a condition was detected which would have prevented an individual from joining the colony, and if that condition persisted, the individual would be required to leave.

  Because primary medical care on Terradox was of an excellent standard, very few instances of such persistent conditions had arisen; many minor ailments had been cured over the course of the colony’s first eighteen months via standard medical interventions, with the medical staff’s efforts greatly aided by the extensive system of automatic testing. Only two colonists had ever needed to venture to Earth for highly specialised treatments which the on-site medical staff weren’t equipped to provide, and one of those had already returned while the other was on course to be welcomed back soon.

  Viola returned to her living room just as Terradox Live AM was drawing to a close. The show ended with a shot of Chase and Nisha talking over coffee, speaking in general terms about how much they were looking forward to getting out of their Isolation Kompound and back to the rest of the colony. Viewers’ comments scrolled along the bottom of the screen as they always did, with most of the show’s fans still as entranced as ever by what one prominent media personality on Earth had called “the slowest-burning on-screen romance of all time”.

  Viola’s wristband then beeped to tell her that the transport capsule she had requested a minute earlier was waiting outside. She closed the front door without locking it — one more thing she’d come to take for granted — and saw one of her neighbours getting into a capsule of his own ahead of his workday at Gardev Heights.

  “Crazy, isn’t it?” the man called.

  “What’s that?” Viola asked.

  His eyebrows furrowed in surprise. “You haven’t heard about Peter and Monica? It’s all anyone is talking about!”

  Viola stood stunned, momentarily silenced.

  “I didn’t mean… well, what happened was that he had to detain her for trespassing in Sunshine Springs and ignoring his direct orders to leave,” the man quickly added, realising that his initial phrasing had understandably planted the seed of a less palatable idea in Viola’s generally unsuspicious mind.

  Her expression and her shoulders relaxed simultaneously. She wasn’t entirely sure why Peter hadn’t mentioned anything about Monica’s detention to her during their voice call, correctly guessing that he simply hadn’t wanted to stress her out before work, but in reality the news that Monica had finally gotten her comeuppance would keep her smiling all day.

  “Don’t do that to me, Terry,” she laughed as she stepped into her capsule. “Don’t do that to me.”

  nine

  Holly gazed down through the window of her K-4 Karrier at the always awe-inspiring sight of the Terradox colony she had worked so hard and so long to establish and maintain. The colony was her life — morning, noon, and night — and no matter what disciplinary or operational problems she might have to deal with on her return after any given quarterly meeting on the Venus station, she would never feel anything but glad to be home.

  Terradox was no longer visually cloaked to prevent external observation, but the dual-layer of romobots which once provided such invisibility necessarily remained. Now however, they performed only the core function of holding in place the entirety of the romosphere’s artificial atmosphere.

  Passage through these layers would be as seamless on this occasion as it had been on every other since automatic cloak-passing devices were first added to all Karrier- and Ferrier-class transport vessels; no human action was needed to prompt the romobots in the outer layer to part sufficiently for the vessel to pass. Those romobots then re-formed the outer cloak before the vessel reached the inner layer, where the process was repeated. Safeguards were in place to avoid atmospheric leakage, with the romobots explicitly programmed to prioritise the integrity of the romosphere over the safety of an individual vessel should there ever be a timing problem caused by an unexpected acceleration or a loss of control while passing between the two layers.

  There had never been even a hint of such an issue arising, but Holly still held her breath every time she approached the inner cloak and only exhaled when her wristband’s flight-tracker finally displayed the two magic words: ENTRY COMPLETE.

  “Every single time you worry, and every single time we make it,” Grav chuckled, briefly lifting his eyes from a six-sided puzzle cube Bo had given him as a birthday gift several weeks earlier. Grav was beginning to consider the damn thing more of a curse than a gift and Bo rarely let a day go by without asking if he’d cracked it yet.

  It had taken Chase Jackson a few months of daily attempts to solve an identically designed puzzle cube which Nisha had brought into the isolation chamber to keep herself occupied, and Grav had long since come to wish that his big mouth hadn’t claimed he could solve it in half the time. Like everything else Chase showed interest in, the cubes had become extremely popular among young people on both Earth and Terradox, where hundreds had been fabricated in the heavily regulated Romotech Production Zone to meet the sudden demand.

  The RPZ, as it was commonly known, was the only zone on Terradox where new romotech-based manufacturing still took place. Prior to its opening, the entirety of the colony had been constructed using romotech fabri
cation — this was the only plausible way to build large structures such an enormous distance from Earth, given the obvious challenge of transporting conventional materials — but tremendous care had been taken at every stage. Unlike during Roger Morrison’s secretive development of the romosphere itself, recent processes hadn’t depended on self-replicating romobots; instead, so-called life-timed romobots had been programmed to build the structures to their set specifications and then essentially switch themselves off.

  One detail few were aware of was that the colony’s construction had in fact involved a certain safe degree of self-replication for the sake of speed, with first-generation romobots programmed to be capable of replicating themselves only once and with the second generation programmed to be both sterile — incapable of replicating at all — and bound by the same lifespan as their parents. Terms like ‘sterile’ and ‘parents’, widely used by romotech designers in these contexts, had initially unsettled some who overheard. Absent of better alternatives, however, the terms gained traction and were now firmly established.

  Holly and Grav understood the overarching concepts behind romotechnology and certainly the potential risks posed by careless applications, but to their laypersons’ minds the technical processes involved might as well have been alchemy.

  Life-timing was one concept they both understood and wholeheartedly approved of. The reason for this was simple: when combined with second-generation romobot sterility, it prevented the possibility of the kind of near-disaster that had very nearly cost them their lives when Netherdox, a then-undetected sister romosphere, had begun to expand at an uncontrolled and unstoppable rate. The use of self-replicating romobots unbound by generational sterility was something which both Holly and Grav would have a hard time approving in any circumstance, and this was precisely why she was yet to loop him in on Bo and Dimitar’s idea for a second romosphere whose construction on any reasonable timescale would be impossible without just such an authorisation.

  The products and devices produced in the RPZ were small and intended for everyday use, filling needs or desires that hadn’t been anticipated prior to the colony’s opening. New variants of things like transport capsules and household appliances were produced when ways to improve upon previous iterations were suggested, and specialist equipment for all manner of research projects was frequently shipped out on the same day the orders came in.

  The RPZ, however, was a long way from Terradox Central Station and a long way from Holly’s mind as she stepped out of her Karrier with Grav and took a wide gulp of the evening air she’d missed so greatly over the past few days. A butterfly crossed her path, reminding her of the surprise she’d felt upon her visit to the ill-fated Terradox Resort when she first saw birds and insects enjoying the previously sterile and lifeless romosphere.

  Two fresh surprises then came her way as Peter and Viola emerged from Terradox Central Station’s interior to greet her return.

  “Good work, Peter,” Grav said, wasting no time in warmly shaking his protégé’s hand. “I know how much of a handful Monica can be.”

  “We’re going to deal with her now,” Holly said after a warm exchange of smiles with Viola. There were clearly no hard feelings lingering from the argument which had clouded Holly’s departure for the quarterly board meeting, which was something Peter and Grav were equally glad to see.

  “Can we just talk about the new restrictions for two minutes?” Viola asked, drawing silent groans from the men and an exasperated sigh from Holly. “Just quickly.”

  “The decisions have been made,” Holly replied flatly, inching towards a waiting transport capsule. “We’ve expedited the introduction and the phase-in starts tomorrow. Viola, I don’t want to fall out over this again and I really wouldn’t have time to talk about it even if I wanted to.”

  “Then at least take this and read it while you’re on the way to deal with Monica,” Viola said, handing Holly a sheet of re-writeable digital paper. “I took some time to really nail down my specific thoughts about the restrictions and I’ve laid them all out clearly.”

  Holly stepped into the transport capsule. “Send it to the suggestions inbox and someone will take a look at it,” she said, speaking without looking back. “I need to check on some things in other zones during our journey. Grav, what’s the holdup?”

  Grav stood awkwardly in front of Viola and Peter. Viola held her notes at arms’ length and nodded, offering them to him.

  “Even if I took it…” Grav sighed, leaving the rest unsaid.

  Viola pinched the corner of her digital paper to disable its rigidity then folded it into quarters, trying not to look as hurt as she was.

  “We will all catch up soon,” Grav added as he entered the capsule. “As soon as we can catch our breaths when everything settles down.”

  Peter raised a hand to wave their capsule off as it departed towards Monica’s holding cell. Viola didn’t.

  “It would have cost nothing to take her damn note and tell her you would consider her points,” Grav groaned, watching them disappear into the distance via the rear-view mirror.

  “I’m not going to lie to her,” Holly replied. “Even when it seems easier in the short term.”

  En route to see Monica, Holly told Grav that she planned to visit Bo in the Buffer around Little Venus once they had dealt with Monica. Grav had been conclusively advised to avoid unnecessary trips to the Buffer since the diagnosis of a relatively minor health condition, and in this instance he was content to get home as soon as he could following a long journey from the Venus station.

  They stepped out of their small but comfortable capsule at the edge of the colony’s Security Centre on the outskirts of the Yury Gardev Memorial Garden just a short while later, ready to deal with their problem.

  At the main entrance, Grav commended a young female guard on her sharply pressed uniform before quietly instructing her male counterpart to straighten his back and push out his chest. Although Peter was nominally in charge of the entire Security division, including this central facility, Grav had been personally responsible for the final recruitment decisions and remained a highly revered figure. But despite having eventually and reluctantly agreed to accept the distinction of having the Goran Vuletic Security Centre named in his honour, Grav had unbudgingly drawn the line when the notion of a statue was raised. As it went, he visited the facility almost every day and his presence was just as imposing as any statue could have been.

  Few of the individuals inside paid much heed to Holly and Grav’s arrival; most were too focused on their highly specialised roles, and all were accustomed to such drop-in visits. The colony’s security personnel universally supported the introduction of the intra-zonal restrictions which had been received with less enthusiasm elsewhere, and the expedited phase-in process was keeping everyone busy. An enormous projection of Terradox’s surface filled a large wall near the entrance, with each zonal boundary marked by a thick red line and each newly restricted area marked in yellow.

  Division heads in all zones had been consulted in this process and the sheer number of new boundaries had been too vast for Holly to individually approve each one. Seeing them all laid out at this size came as something of a surprise — there were considerably more than she’d realised — but she understood that many of the yellow markers were in places where physical doors already required high-level clearance to open, and that the new system was primarily strengthening existing access restrictions rather than introducing new ones. It struck her now that this point could and should have been made clearer to those who felt uncomfortable with the changes, like Viola, since it was inherently more palatable than the idea of hundreds of areas suddenly becoming inaccessible to the vast majority of colonists.

  “Is Monica still in the holding cells?” Grav asked a uniformed officer by the door.

  The man rose from his seated post. “She is indeed, sir. I’ll arrange for someone to escort you there now.”

  “I think we’ll be fine,” Holly said.
“But thanks.” She glanced through internal windows and doors as she walked deeper into the facility, as pleased as ever to see the attentive efficiency of the staff tasked with keeping Terradox safe.

  “After you,” Grav said at the entrance to the holding cells, none of which had ever had to be used until Monica Pierce’s recent detention.

  “Hello?” Monica called as soon as the door opened. “Who’s that? Listen, all I want is my wristband. I just need to make one call. If you pass it in, I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Holly walked into view of the cell where Peter had placed Monica, the last in a line of eight, and stopped only when she was directly in front of her. “Save it.”

  “At last,” Monica sighed, either glad to see Holly and Grav or doing a laudable job of pretending to be. “Honestly, Holly, when you’re not here these people get so… what’s the word… officious. It’s all ‘rulebook’ this and ‘protocol’ that. You don’t need to pass my wristband through the bars; just unlock the cell and we’ll put this whole thing behind us. No hard feelings.”

  Monica looked surprisingly presentable for someone who had spent so long in a cell, even one as comfortable and well-stocked as this one, but the imperfections in her normally immaculate hair and makeup were unmissable. The look in her eyes was as intense as ever, with her high cheekbones and carefully shaped eyebrows contributing to a near-constant expression of upbeat interest and her expensively perfect smile doing its best to exude friendliness.

  Grav chuckled incredulously. “Listen, Monica…”

  “I was talking to Holly.”

  Grav’s chuckle gave way to a roaring laugh. He held a hand out towards Holly. “She is all yours, Hollywood.”

  Holly stepped forward. “So this is what happens when I turn my back on you for a few days? You know better than to push your luck when we’re here, but as soon as we leave you start—”