“Only three of us,” Holly said. “Myself, Grav and Peter. I can override the system to amend anyone else’s access privileges at any time, and that ability would automatically pass to Grav if I was ever incapacitated.”
“Cool. Well, um, if you’re looking for Christian now, he just left his office to head out to the tropical nursery. A word of caution: that place is hot.”
Holly grinned. “I guess the clue’s in the name.” She then waved goodbye and left the lab to walk the short distance to the largest of the Gardens’ new microspheres. She soon saw Christian on his knees, poring over a new crop of seedlings. He was wearing a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up and was chewing on a long paper straw, a habit he still hadn’t kicked a full three years after quitting smoking as a condition of his application for a place on the colony. It was an open secret that Christian enjoyed a nightly glass of wine from his vineyard, but no one seemed to mind; he was an excellent researcher who was as popular with his subordinates as he was with Holly and other senior figures, and no one could deny that his contributions far outweighed even the astronomical on-Earth value of the small amount of wine he consumed.
“Anything exciting growing in there?” Holly called, taking him by surprise.
He turned around and rose to his feet upon hearing her voice. “Careful,” he called. “The change can be unsettling.”
Holly crossed the boundary before Christian completed this sentence, and she immediately knew both what he meant about the change being unsettling and why the young researcher had tried to stress how hot it was within the tropical nursery. She instinctively stepped back to the normality of the other side of the invisible line.
It was one thing to know about microspheres, or indeed the primary zonal divisions which had been present on Terradox even before its public discovery, but it was something else entirely to experience the sensation of crossing an unmarked threshold between two highly distinct artificial atmospheres. Most impressive was the complete lack of a physical boundary; there wasn’t so much as a line, let alone a wall.
Holly somewhat understood how this worked in a loose technical sense: the submicroscopic romobots which composed the boundary were arranged in a double-layered adaptive cloak, not unlike that which kept thousands of people alive by holding the entirety of Terradox’s artificial atmosphere in place. As she stepped forward across a threshold, one layer moved forward with her while the other parted and reformed behind her. The inner layer then followed suit, fully enveloping her within the zone. A dial in Christian’s control centre could change how ‘porous’ any given boundary was, with the tropical nursery’s set to allow humans to pass unperturbed but not to allow the entry of anything significantly smaller, such as the butterflies or other beneficial insects which roamed freely in other open areas of the Gardens.
As Holly shied away from the tropical heat, Christian laughed heartily and walked towards her. “It’s pleasant once you get used to it,” he said. “Are you coming in, or do you want me to come out? Bo told me you were coming to pick my brain about these microspheres. If you’re looking for an endorsement, I’ve got two thumbs all the way up.”
Very suddenly, a shrill alarm began to emanate from both Holly and Christian’s wristbands.
“What the hell is this?” Christian asked, taking the words right out of her mouth.
Holly looked at her wristband’s screen and saw six ominous words:
EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN: LITTLE VENUS BUFFER ZONE.
“Chase!” Christian yelled, seeing the same thing on his own wristband and immediately sprinting off towards the nearest bridge which would take him out of the Gardens and towards a waiting transport capsule. “Holly, come on! Something must be wrong in the Kompound.”
But why would they lock down the Buffer?… Holly thought to herself. A new sound then took over from the shrill alarm; the more standard and far less unsettling sound of an incoming call. It originated from Bo.
“Bo is calling,” Holly shouted to Christian, sprinting to catch up with him before he reached a transport capsule in his panic. He was around her age at 44, but was less accustomed to running and thus quite easily caught.
Holly took Bo’s call immediately and reached Christian before Bo had finished telling her that she had to get to the Buffer as quickly as she could. As soon as Christian heard Bo’s voice, he yelled over Holly’s, directly into her wristband:
“Bo? What’s going on? Is Chase okay?”
“We had to lock everything down,” Bo replied, clearly out of breath from whatever had happened or whatever was still happening. “The Kompound is okay. Something happened here, in the Buffer. It’s nothing to do with Chase or Nisha or any of the other test subjects. Holly, it’s Sakura.”
Although Christian visibly relaxed, the momentary relief Holly felt upon hearing that Chase and his colleagues in the Isolation Kompound were okay faded instantly when Sakura’s name came up. She had hoped to catch up with her close friend sometime later in the day having been unable to do so recently, but Bo’s tone was highly unsettling.
“What’s Sakura?” she asked. “What’s she doing? Where is she?”
“She was here,” Bo said, his voice both panicked and weak. “She is here.”
“Bo, spit it out! What the hell is going on?” Holly yelled, trying to be patient but finding it difficult to deal with Bo’s long and pained pauses.
But when his answer came, she wished it hadn’t.
“Holly…” he gulped, audibly fighting back tears as he prepared to force it out. “Sakura’s dead.”
Part II
fifteen
Shortly after breakfast in the Isolation Kompound, Steve Shepherd’s borderline obsessive behaviour spilled over into real interpersonal strife for the first time.
Sitting under the light a full hour before it was due to flash to signal the changeover of the latest six-hour shift among their external observers, Steve took exception to a comment from Marcel Platt that he was only going to drive himself crazier by watching the light for longer and longer each day.
Marcel, a close friend of both Chase Jackson and Nisha Kohli who, like them, had always gotten along well enough with the other three subjects of the isolation test, intended no harm or criticism in his words. He apologised when Steve took exception and repeatedly tried to calm him down, but Steve’s angry reaction to being called crazy — as he interpreted it — ultimately beckoned Chase from the kitchen area.
Chase rebuked both Marcel and Steve in no uncertain terms, insisting that he didn’t care who had started it — he was stopping it. The hubbub also attracted the attention of Lee Kim and Sara Helms, the two would-be astronauts who rounded out the group and had done their chances of selection for future missions little good by largely keeping to each other’s company. Neither woman had ever been overtly distant or isolationist, but neither Chase nor any of the external observers expected that either would even pursue future selection. Both had conducted productive research in their fields — Kim in botany and Sara in biology — but both had been fairly open in telling the privacy room’s camera that they couldn’t wait to get out almost as soon as they went in.
Until now, no one in the group had ever posed any kind of problem. Chase encouraged Kim and Sara to leave the central corridor while he dealt with the situation, and his tone was firm enough to ensure their immediate cooperation. He asked the same of Nisha, who was only peeking into the corridor, before authoritatively telling Steve and Marcel to shake hands and apologise to each other.
“Now go and apologise to the others for disrupting their morning with your bullshit,” he said, taking them by surprise. It was a deliberate tactic to unify the two in arguing against the necessity of such an action, thus giving them a common ground which couldn’t help but push their prior disagreement to the back of their minds and even more importantly to move the issue of the light from the front of Steve’s.
“I hardly think that’s necessary,” Marcel replied to his good friend, assu
ming Chase would be more responsive if he spoke up first than if Steve made their case.
Chase didn’t blink. “Did I ask what you think?”
Marcel and Steve looked at each other in even greater surprise at Chase’s tone; again, just as he intended. He remained focused on Marcel and subtly raised his eyebrows when Steve momentarily looked away.
Marcel eventually understood what Chase was getting at and let out a passably legitimate sigh. “If it’ll shut him up…” he said to Steve.
“Come on, then,” Steve groaned. “Let’s get it over with.”
As the two set off, Marcel glanced back and smiled at Chase while giving him a thumbs-up for dealing with Steve so effectively.
Chase gestured for Marcel to turn back around before Steve noticed.
In Chase Jackson’s mind, there was nothing to smile about. Because with six days of their year-long isolation test remaining, Steve Shepherd was becoming a real problem.
sixteen
In the editing suite at the heart of Terradox Studios, inside the only operational zone she was currently permitted to venture, Monica Pierce sat bolt upright in her chair as a smile grew across her face.
“And this is confirmed?” she asked, speaking into her wristband. “Something is definitely happening?”
“Absolutely confirmed,” a male voice replied, speaking from a room elsewhere in the studio complex. “A message went out to all departmental heads that the Buffer is in lockdown, and we can see that nothing major has happened in the Kompound. Chase just finished dealing with the Steve and Marcel thing, but there’s no way that’s worthy of a lockdown.”
“It could be,” Monica sighed, slouching in disappointment at no longer being quite so sure that something had gone wrong. “You know how cautious they are about everything. Do we know where Holly is? That could be a clue.”
“In a transport capsule with Christian Jackson. They just left the Gardens and it looks like they’re heading for Little Venus.”
Monica scratched her chin.
“Wait a second, I’ve just received a message,” said the man on the other end of the line. A slow gasp followed his words. “Medics have been called. Monica… they’ve been told that Sakura Otsuka just collapsed outside of her office. She’s dead!”
“Holy shit,” Monica replied, eyes widening. “Get a crew to the perimeter, right now. This is gold…”
seventeen
Sakura Otsuka’s death, as yet unexplained, represented the first on Terradox since the harrowing day when Remy Bouchard and too many others had died because of David Boyce and his cowardly takeover of the ill-prepared and ill-fated Terradox Resort.
Holly and Christian’s transport capsule stopped at the site of Remy’s death — the old security bunker which had been converted into the romosphere’s state-of-the-art Security Centre, a stone’s throw from the Yury Gardev Memorial Garden — to collect Grav on their way to Little Venus.
His face said it all, and he couldn’t say anything to soothe Holly’s feelings of loss any more than she could say anything to soothe his. Both had known Sakura for several years, both had risked life and limb alongside her on the surface of Netherdox, and both had grown extremely close to her in the intervening time. Grav was a man respected by all but truly friendly with few, and the news had left him looking more upset than Holly could ever remember. Yury’s death had been hard for Grav to take, of course, but it had been nowhere near as untimely as this.
Christian Jackson, without doubt Grav’s closest male friend on Terradox, knew better than to break the oppressive silence inside the capsule with any attempt at comforting either him or Holly.
Prior to picking up Grav, Holly had communicated extensively with Bo and learned only that Sakura had collapsed for no obvious reason and that Peter Ospanov had unilaterally and wisely decided to lock down the entirety of the Buffer. Christian had meanwhile called his wife, Jillian, and passed on the news that the lockdown was unrelated to Chase’s group in the Isolation Kompound. He heeded Holly’s request to avoid mentioning Sakura just yet, understanding that it was important for the news to be broken as delicately as possible.
Christian didn’t quite know how Holly was able to retain such clarity of mind in the moments after receiving such traumatic news, but he also knew better than to share this thought.
It was only when The Wall came into view that Grav spoke.
“So,” he began, clearing his dry throat with a rough cough. “Are we telling Chase and the others anything, or does the test go on?”
Christian glanced inquisitively at Holly, understandably keen to know the answer.
“No one is telling them anything,” she said, softly but decisively. “Uncertainty and fear can spread like a virus and infect a crew in no time. I don’t care how long is left…. the last thing the crew needs is something to worry about or something bad to talk about amongst themselves.”
The initial gut-wrenching shock of Sakura’s death had worn off after a matter of minutes, but this had only left more room for grief in Holly’s heart and mind as the realisation that she was gone began to sink in. Answering Grav’s question, however, redirected her focus once again by dredging up memories of a best-forgotten episode which still influenced her decisions and bore much of the responsibility for her abundantly cautious approach to managing the colony; an approach which sometimes saw her desire to manage risk mistaken for a lust for control.
Her physical scars, including the loss of an eye, had proven much easier to live with over the decades than the memories which still haunted her dreams every so often despite her having tried all kinds of therapies and techniques to consign them to the past.
Everyone was familiar with the story of Holly’s participation in a maniacal “psychological fitness test” conducted by the equally maniacal Roger Morrison, back in the days before his rise to political power within the now-defunct Global Union. Morrison had recruited a crew of astronauts from the bankrupt public space program, including Holly, and used incredibly convincing simulation technology and sensory manipulation to hoodwink them into believing that their craft had crash-landed on an alien world when in reality they were being monitored within a controlled environment on Earth.
The test, designed to measure the reactions of a select group of astronauts who truly believed they were stranded, led to the deaths of two individuals, both of whom Holly reluctantly killed in self-defence when they attempted to eliminate her in a bid to preserve resources for themselves. She understood more than anyone that even trained professionals could revert to base instincts when the circumstances became bleak enough, and these experiences had fed into the design of the isolation test currently underway inside Little Venus.
The primary difference, of course, was that Chase Jackson and his colleagues understood perfectly well that they weren’t truly stranded; however hostile their immediate surroundings, they knew that the civility and tranquillity of the colony was only a few miles from their Kompound. The crew of six had been thoroughly evaluated prior to the test’s commencement and were monitored round the clock for any signs of aggression or emotional frailty. Minor concerns had recently emerged over one test subject’s unhealthy focus on a light which existed as much to encourage disciplined attentiveness among the observation team as it did to give the subjects an assurance that they hadn’t been abandoned, but Holly had been assured that there was nothing serious to worry about on that front.
Although she had heard about it shortly after waking up, Holly hadn’t yet seen the previous night’s episode of Terradox Live which happened to feature an interview with the Earth-based family of Steve Shepherd, the crew member in question. Steve’s parents expressed serious concerns about his wellbeing but stated that they were glad he had Chase in there to keep him calm for the short time that remained. Holly wasn’t completely relaxed about Steve’s growing erraticism, but she fully shared his parents’ relief that Chase was there to stop things from boiling over.
“I think we shou
ld pull them out,” Christian Jackson said, very suddenly and very bluntly pulling Holly’s mind right back into the present. As Chase’s father, his position was understandable; but that didn’t mean it was one Holly had any time for.
“They’re three hundred and fifty-nine days in,” she said, “and they don’t even have a reason to suspect that anything is wrong on the outside. If we ended the test because of something that doesn’t directly affect them, they would never forgive us. Don’t forget that the board made the successful completion of this isolation test a condition of moving on to the next stage in our plans for a program of exploration. The details don’t matter… if we pull them out, they fail because of us. Christian, I can’t pretend to know exactly what you must be feeling with your son inside that Kompound. But if I thought he was in any danger, I would have already called off the test.”
“It is true,” Grav said. “And Christian, please… once we cross The Wall, do not mention the idea of pulling the plug on the test. Just like Chase’s crew, the last thing our team in the Buffer needs is uncertainty.”
Christian nodded slowly, appearing more or less convinced. The transport capsule drew to a halt in the shadow of The Wall. “Will I be able to get in here?” he asked as they all climbed out of the capsule. “Do I have clearance?”
Holly tapped through several options on her wristband. “You do now,” she said.
Christian looked at his own wristband and saw a flashing message: UNIVERSAL ACCESS ENABLED. Satisfied with that, he walked forward with Grav and Holly.
A security officer, hired and trained by Grav, then surprised the trio by stepping directly in front of them with his palm out. “Grav, sir… your condition. You know you can’t come inside.”
Grav waved his hand dismissively. “I am fine.”
Terradox Reborn Page 12
