While the children were off exploring, Holly caught up with Robert in the afternoon. “They’ll always have each other for company,” she said, responding to his concern about the lack of other children and wishing as an only child that she had been so lucky.
“More like have each other to annoy,” Robert said, proceeding to recount a heated argument they’d had before setting off over who was responsible for a tiny food spillage in the family dorm’s common area between their individual rooms.
They returned, smiling, while Holly was still talking to Robert. “What are the plans for going back to Earth?” he asked. “This place is great…” he hastened to add, “I just mean, you know, going forward.”
“As soon as Rusev says it’s safe,” Holly replied. “Depending on how many people want to leave, it would either take a few trips on the Karrier or one trip on one of the station’s component spacecraft. This place is designed to be fully operational with just the two main parts, but I doubt too many people are going to leave; most of them were working and living here long before Rusev started ferrying important passengers and cargo.”
“But you’re definitely coming back with us?” Viola asked.
Holly lowered her eyebrows as if the question had caught her off guard. “Of course I am; a million per cent. Earth is home.”
“So what do you think it’s going to be like?” Bo asked. “Different governments in different countries?”
“Probably. But the next few years aren’t going to be easy. It’s not like the GU has been around too long for anyone to remember a time before it — maybe you guys, but not most of us — so it’s not quite a leap into the dark. And everyone now knows that a lot of the problems that led to the GU were artificially engineered to create the need for it. There are going to be some power vacuums, though… big ones in some places. That’s why I said it’s not going to be easy.”
“It’ll be a lot easier to get the world back on track now than it would have been if everyone was dead,” Viola said. “Anyway, I’m going to get something to eat. Does anyone want anything from the machine?”
Holly perked up. “I could eat,” she said.
“Two hundred choices, and they’re all algae…” Viola quipped, repeating the line Grav had taught her what felt like a lot longer ago than it really was.
“I’ll have whatever you’re having,” Holly said. “Which I’m guessing is going to be lasagne.”
“Vegetarian lasagne,” the girl qualified with a knowing grin. “Same for you?”
Holly laughed the freest laugh she had in a long time. “Fine,” she said. “Why the hell not.”
A few hours later, Holly lay peacefully on her bed in the dorm next to the Harringtons’.
She gazed at the screen panel on the wall at her bedside, configured for split-screen viewing with Earth on one side and Terradox on the other. Though hardly nostalgic of her time on the mysterious romosphere’s surface, she fully realised that decisively liberating the former from the GU’s grasp would not have been possible without unceremoniously crashing into the latter.
And though they didn’t yet know it, the 4.2 billion fragile souls on one side of the screen owed a tremendous debt of gratitude to the one brave man on the other.
After knocking loudly three times, Grav entered Holly’s room.
“Okay,” his deep voice boomed from the doorway. “It is time for me to go with the rest of the crew to get Spaceman. Are you sure you do not want to come?”
“I’m going to stay here with the kids.”
Grav raised his eyebrows. “But the record we share for most distance travelled… if you do not come, it will no longer be shared.”
“You can have it,” Holly chuckled. “Or you could stay here, too. The crew can take care of it.”
Grav crinkled his nose and shook his head slowly. “Their job is taking care of the Karrier and the journey,” he said.
“So what’s yours?”
“Well, Hollywood… I guess you could say that our stubborn old Spaceman is not going to chaperone himself.”
“Chaperone?” Holly laughed.
Grav winked before turning to leave. “Tough job, but somebody has to do it.”
The Fall of Terradox
Part I
one
“Ladies and gentlemen, our landing on Terradox will commence as scheduled in one hour.”
Holly shifted in her seat and grinned as the automated announcement played through the speakers overhead.
“I bet you thought you’d never come back,” an upbeat human voice added from the seat next to Holly’s. It belonged to Cherise Bouchard, a fellow traveller she had grown close to during their journey from Earth.
Holly’s slight grin now gave way to a full smile as a warm laugh escaped her mouth. “I still can’t believe they talked me into this.”
A digital countdown to arrival suddenly appeared on one of the large screens in front of Holly, replacing a live zoomed-in view of her destination. The screen beside it, even larger, continued to show live footage from the welcome area in an extremely familiar grassy valley on Terradox itself. This welcome area was dominated by a newly erected building which bore the words TERRADOX CENTRAL STATION on its imposing facade in Art Deco lettering. The area buzzed with activity, in stark contrast to the eerie lifelessness of the very same valley Holly had left prior to escaping the mysterious planet-like romosphere with no intent of ever returning.
Holly’s method of transport had changed much since then, too.
The VIP lounge where she and Cherise were currently relaxing, one of several within their state-of-the-art Ferrier-class transporter, was tastefully arranged and understandably popular among those with sufficient credentials. Wealthy tourists lounged on comfortable sofas and sipped real coffee brewed by real-life human baristas, a great improvement on the coffee-flavoured and machine-delivered hot water that had satisfied Holly’s passengers during her many chaperoning trips to the Venus station on the trusty old Karrier. Inside and out, this much newer and much larger Ferrier was a class apart.
For many frustrating years, existing technology had enabled significantly faster transport speeds than the ageing Karriers were capable of. But now that material shortages on Earth no longer acted as crippling bottlenecks in the production process, as they had during Roger Morrison’s time atop the corrupt pyramid of the now defunct Global Union, theory had at last been put into practice.
The Ferriers were around 45% faster than the old Karriers; evolution rather than revolution, for sure. Nevertheless, this was a welcome leap in the right direction towards the kind of speeds desired by Ekaterina Rusev, CEO of the Rusentra corporation which developed the Ferrier fleet and administered the Venus-orbiting research station where they were designed, and even more so by her highly ambitious son Dimitar.
After polite requests from more than a handful of passengers, the live view of Terradox — growing indiscernibly closer by the second — was returned to the smaller screen in place of the landing countdown. Perhaps the easiest decision made by the Terradox Management Committee had been the decision to make Terradox visible at all times, disabling the romosphere’s invisibility cloak just as Yury ‘Spaceman’ Gardev had so courageously done for the first time four years earlier, on the epoch-defining day which had come to be known universally as Revelation Day.
While most around her were fixated on the live view of their destination, Holly’s eyes remained primarily drawn to the broadcast footage from Terradox’s surface. In the same grassy valley as Terradox Central Station and within shouting distance of the landing spot where she would soon touch down, Holly could see the preserved Karrier in which she and her group of unwitting explorers had been drawn towards the Terradox romosphere back when no one outside of Morrison’s inner circle even knew it existed.
All potentially volatile materials had of course been removed from the fallen Karrier long ago, but its interior otherwise remained in the exact state it had been in when Holly, Grav, Yu
ry, Rusev and the Harringtons exited it for the last time. Other sites of historical interest had also been carefully preserved as Holly’s group had left them, with “authenticity” being the key marketing buzzword surrounding the headline Footsteps of Heroes touring experience which was enjoyed by all guests of the eye-wateringly expensive Terradox Resort.
The very existence of this Resort was a matter of constant debate on Earth, where many believed that Terradox should have been destroyed as soon as it was discovered by Holly’s group four years earlier. Although Holly didn’t ascribe to that extreme view, she publicly supported the global moratorium on new applications of romotechnology. The bottom-up construction of colossal romotech structures such as Terradox posed particularly great risks given the need to utilise self-replicating romobots in the construction process, but Holly agreed with the popular opinion that all new non-essential applications of the matter-manipulating technology were unjustifiably risky.
As Holly looked at the fallen Karrier which had once brought her to the edge of Terradox before difficulties forced her to finish the descent in an emergency lander occupied by the terrified Harrington family, she knew one thing for certain:
Whatever might happen once she set foot again on the miraculous romosphere’s surface, this landing was sure to be a whole lot more comfortable.
“They’re with me,” Cherise called across the lounge, drawing Holly’s attention to the woman’s husband and twin daughters as they stood next to an unbudging guard at the entrance to the VIP area.
“And she’s with me,” Holly added, maintaining firm eye contact for long enough to persuade the guard to unhook the red rope from the barrier and allow Cherise’s family inside.
The guard insisted upon patting down Cherise’s husband, Remy, before allowing him to pass. Remy didn’t make a fuss about this but was clearly embarrassed as the other passengers in the lounge watched on.
“Overzealous if you ask me,” he sighed, taking a seat in the empty chair next to Holly.
“I’d rather the security people were overzealous than under-zealous,” Cherise mused.
Holly couldn’t disagree with this view, although there had been a few times during the journey when she had questioned the need for so many visibly armed guards.
Given the depth of the background checks carried out on all would-be tourists before their applications were approved, not to mention the sophisticated scanning technology used to pore over every ounce of their luggage or the ubiquitous recording equipment built into every wall throughout the Ferrier, the overbearing and inescapable presence of the guards struck Holly as decidedly unnecessary. She expected to find similar numbers of guards on Terradox, even though each individual tourist’s movements would be closely monitored and everyone would be restricted to the New Eden complex for the entirety of their stay other than during carefully managed excursions.
What had always irked Holly far more than the Ferrier’s conspicuously visible security was its system of class division. VIP lounges were one thing, and she could handle that, but some of the restrictions placed on Cherise’s family and others like them went beyond what Holly considered reasonable.
Each Ferrier bound for the Terradox Resort contained four families who had won their all-expenses-paid trips in a free-to-enter global lottery which had been created to make the expensive experience theoretically accessible to all. Two of the latest lottery-winning families were Chinese and one was Brazilian; despite their children’s initial interest in Holly, the language barrier meant that their interactions with her never went far beyond waves and smiles in the corridor. Holly’s closeness to Cherise and the rest of the Bouchard family, on the other hand, had highlighted some of the needless restrictions placed upon the lottery-winners, who seemed to be considered a personal inconvenience to each member of the Ferrier’s staff.
Cherise was a young mother of Nigerian descent. Her daughters, along with her slightly older husband, were born and raised Canadians. The twins — five and a half years old, as they repeatedly made sure Holly understood — were always immaculately turned out in themed-but-not-quite-matching outfits and with pastel coloured bows in their frizzy-by-lunchtime hair. Holly could easily tell the girls apart but didn’t mind playing along with their game of trying to trick her into getting it wrong. Their names, Cecelia and Diana, were shortened to CeCe and DeeDee by their parents and each other so consistently that Holly didn’t realise those were nicknames until she saw the girls’ full names written outside their designated room in the Ferrier’s “Winners’ Zone”.
The Bouchards and the other lottery-winning families were confined to this out-of-the-way zone after 8pm — “locked in the ghetto,” as their father Remy only slightly jokingly put it — in order to minimise the number of security guards and other staff required to be on duty overnight. Remy had no complaints about the material conditions within the Winners’ Zone, but he found it beyond obvious that his family were seen as a burden by many on board. Cherise played down his misgivings, telling him “it’s not like we’re on the bottom deck of the Titanic”, while the relatively basic furnishings in their relatively small room didn’t prevent the girls from seeing it as a fairytale palace. All of the lottery-winners wore red lanyards, in contrast with the white lanyards worn by paying tourists, and this was just one more small thing which bothered the girls far less than it bothered their father.
The boundless energy of the twins and the pleasant down-to-earth nature of their friendly parents made Holly’s journey to Terradox infinitely easier than it would have been without them. She was glad they had won the chance to visit such an exclusive destination and even more so that they had won a trip in the most sought-after visiting window — by sheer luck of the draw, their 28-night stay would encompass the full spectrum of celebratory events scheduled to culminate in a grand Anniversary Gala marking the Terradox Resort’s first full year in operation.
These celebratory events were the very reason that Holly had agreed to leave behind her stable and trouble-free life on an increasingly stable and trouble-free Earth for so long. When the internationally administered Terradox Management Committee keenly asked Holly to attend the Gala, telling her how much of a boost her presence would be and incessantly reminding her that all profits raised by TMC operations were invested in worthy programs on Earth, she found it more difficult to turn down this latest invitation than she had on previous occasions. When she learned that the rest of her initial landing group would be travelling from the Venus station to Terradox for the big day, she found it easy to say yes.
Thirty minutes passed in a flash, at which point an automated announcement asked all guests to return to their rooms ahead of the commencement of final landing procedures.
Rising to his feet, Remy Bouchard quietly joked that his family would need roller-skates to make it to the Winners’ Zone at the other end of the Ferrier before it landed. Holly told the girls she would see them on the ground, then watched them set off along the corridor before making her own short walk to the enormous VIP suite.
Her name — Ivy ‘Holly’ Wood — was printed in sparkling silver on its double-wide door.
Once inside, Holly looked out of her circular window and caught sight of Terradox. She took in its curvature with her naked eye for the first time since escaping the cloak’s outer layer in a rescue Karrier bound for the Venus station some four years earlier.
To say that her emotions were mixed would not come close. Enthusiasm gave way to trepidation and returned just as quickly. The two didn’t battle for position in her mind so much as they coexisted, uneasy and incompatible bedfellows befitting an uneasy and unprecedented situation.
Terradox was an absolute marvel; an awe-inspiring and wondrous sight, regardless of who had created it and for what purpose. But, from bitter experience, Holly knew just how fragile life within its artificial atmosphere truly was. If she could have done so, she would have loved nothing more than to divert the Ferrier’s course away from Roger Morrison’s m
iracle of madness and straight towards the tranquillity and security of Ekaterina Rusev’s Venus station.
With no such option, Holly now gazed down with no little apprehension at Terradox, the romosphere she would call home for the next few weeks.
two
Holly stood quietly and looked down towards Terradox as the Ferrier steadily approached.
She realised after a short while just how silent her room had become, with no sound coming through the slightly open door which led to corridors that had been brimming with excited children and overwhelmed parents just minutes earlier.
Despite all of the promotional pictures and videos she had seen featuring many of the Terradox Resort’s most popular locations and attractions, Holly knew that she wouldn’t really be able to comprehend any of it until she was down there seeing it all for herself.
She knew that New Eden, once the most unsettlingly vacant place she had ever been, was now the Resort’s vibrant hub. Guests slept in the existing underground accommodation, in the rooms originally intended for Roger Morrison’s post-Reset chosen few.
New Eden, in essence, had become by a distance the most expensive hotel complex in the universe. Holly had initially been displeased by the cost — prohibitive to the vast majority of Earth’s citizens — as well as the inherent creepiness of the location. She felt torn; in one sense, her situation brought to mind the trips to the Venus station when she believed she was chaperoning hyper-rich patrons… only this time, the vast majority of her fellow travellers truly were extremely wealthy.
The opportunity provided by the lottery went some way to assuage her uneasiness at the prospect of Terradox becoming something akin to the kind of playground of the rich that Morrison himself had intended. But what had ultimately soothed Holly on the moral aspect of monetising Terradox was her recent reminder that the publicly operated nature of the Terradox Management Committee meant that high-value tour purchases essentially amounted to large voluntary transfers of wealth from well-off individuals to the public purse, a purse from which that wealth would be distributed to international development projects and humanitarian initiatives on Earth.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 35
