Terradox Quadrilogy

by Craig A. Falconer

  “I’m going nowhere,” Monica said, somewhere between defiant and accepting. “But am I allowed to walk through this stupid place by myself or do I need another babysitter?”

  “We trust that you know better than to step out of line,” Grav said, tapping his wristband. “Literally.”

  ten

  A recently diagnosed lymphatic condition, though mild and perfectly manageable, precluded Grav from being medically cleared to cross The Wall which surrounded Little Venus. He didn’t particularly care and was only too glad to retire for the night when Holly restated her intention to visit Bo Harrington, who was still hard at work inside his main lab at Little Venus.

  Grav’s absence would allow Holly to ask Bo about the far-flung plans for a second romosphere she had already heard about from Dimitar, and the likely strength of Grav’s inevitable objections made her glad that he wouldn’t be there. Whatever Bo’s ideas amounted to and wherever they ended up leading, it would be far easier for Holly to loop Grav in once she had a full grasp of the implications, rather than to have him by her side while Bo excitedly ran through the plans in his usual unrestrained-by-safety-concerns way.

  After dropping Grav off outside his plush home at the edge of Sunshine Springs, Holly travelled at great pace in her transport capsule until it arrived at the enormous and imposing structure known simply as The Wall.

  The Wall surrounded the entirety of Little Venus: the utterly inhospitable core experimental zone, and also the so-called ‘Buffer’ of eight square zones which surrounded it. Although in official use the term ‘Little Venus’ applied only to the central zone in which Chase Jackson and his colleagues were currently nearing the end of their time in the claustrophobic Isolation Kompound, in common speech it was also often used in reference to the entire nine-zone area. Bo and others who worked within The Wall were more precise if less grammatically correct in their language — he would say he worked ‘behind The Wall’ rather than ‘in Little Venus’ — but when Holly told Grav where she was going, she had followed the common pattern of simply saying ‘Little Venus’ rather than unnecessarily specifying that she would be staying safely within the linked zones around it, which were generally referred to singularly and simply as ‘the Buffer’.

  Such a Buffer was deemed necessary because of the unusually vast differences in atmospheric conditions between Little Venus and the rest of the colony. Although other significantly differentiated zones such as the Primosphere also had modified atmospheres which would cause real problems for anyone foolish enough to step inside without appropriate protective wear, Little Venus was in a league of its own.

  In a word, its conditions were hellish. The idea, quite simply, had been to replicate the conditions which exploration vehicles and research vessels would face on the real Venus once the planet’s impossibly hostile atmosphere had been partially tamed. The precise extent and nature of potential taming processes were hotly debated topics, with traditional ideas of terraforming roundly dismissed as fantastical and the primary alternative of so-called romoforming raising as many new questions as it answered.

  The temperature and pressure within the core Little Venus zone would instantly kill anyone exposed to them, despite occasional rumours and conspiracy theories on Earth that there was no real danger involved in the isolation test which had made stars of Chase and his colleagues.

  Bo’s work involved testing rovers within these genuinely hostile conditions and real progress had been made in the last few months, with the latest models still fully operational several weeks after going in. Most encouragingly, living organisms within the new rovers had survived where others had immediately died.

  Holly hadn’t initially been quite so impressed with this news as Bo had expected when he first excitedly told her — after all, she had been watching Chase, Nisha and the others in the Isolation Kompound surviving just fine for almost a full year. But Bo explained that it was a lot easier to build an enormous static structure capable of sustaining life within the harsh conditions of Little Venus than it was to create a similarly life-preserving lightweight rover which could carry a crew of four and also be piloted remotely. When he contextualised the level of his achievement in terms Holly could better understand — “the rovers that kept us alive on Netherdox didn’t even last two minutes in Little Venus” — she heartily encouraged him to keep up the good work.

  The Wall, which had been the first thing visible on the ground during Holly’s latest landing on Terradox, was a largely symbolic boundary. No one disputed the need for a visual marker, but everyone understood that Terradox’s inherent and invisible zonal divisions — once so mysterious to Holly and her initial shipwrecked landing party — could now be made visible with screen-like signage acting as a kind of video wall, capable of displaying any adaptive landscape or static ground-to-sky image along the entire boundary with an uncanny degree of convincingness. This method was used at the edge of the Primosphere and other zones where a visual marker was desired, but Little Venus merited a special marker in keeping with the special place it held in the hearts and minds of all colonists. Most considered it the most important zone of all and many saw it as the colony’s principle reason for being, and even those with no particularly great interest in the work conducted behind The Wall understood why it was there.

  The Buffer zones immediately behind The Wall were significantly warmer than the rest of the colony, though naturally nowhere close to the heat of the central zone, and an artificial landscape was projected onto its interior to give its researchers the visual impression that they were in a laboratory on Venus proper.

  Although the area followed familiar Earthly hours as a concession to maintain productivity, observers behind The Wall saw the sun rising in the west and setting in the east. Small groups of school children were occasionally permitted to tour behind The Wall as a reward for consistently good progress or exceptional achievements, and this apparent ‘backwards’ movement of the sun — really no more artificial a projection than the one they were so used to — was something many of them picked up on.

  Holly’s own feelings regarding the imposing structure and what it represented were somewhat mixed. Like a significant number of high-ranking researchers and even Rusentra board members, she no longer considered the taming of Venus to be an endeavour worthy of the costs and risks involved.

  As she stood in the shadow of The Wall on a man-made satellite more expansive and more comfortable than anywhere she had ever been on Earth, it was difficult for Holly to shake the idea that the old arguments for colonising Venus no longer held much appeal. Exploration, however, was another thing altogether — she would never be against that — and the isolation test currently underway deep inside Little Venus was part of an important program to select and train the next generation of astronauts who would soon engage in missions once deemed impossible.

  Given the long history of the Venus station, Holly understood why a great number of decision-makers at Rusentra remained as focused as ever on conquering the morning star. Slowly but surely, though, even most of them were coming to understand that their focus on Venus was an emotional relic of the years before the discovery of Terradox and the possibilities it presented.

  Wherever Chase Jackson, Nisha Kohli and their colleagues might end up, Holly was keen to get a direct view of their Isolation Kompound while she grilled Bo on the reckless but admittedly interesting plans he had been developing in his free time.

  Holly pressed her palm against The Wall then allowed her identity to be checked by the pop-out retinal scanner. As a small doorway opened, a burst of hot air brushed by her face and neck.

  She rolled up her sleeves and crossed the line.

  eleven

  Only a small number of night-shift workers were present as Holly headed for Bo’s workshop. She knew he would be there, even at this hour, but quickly made sure by checking his location via her wristband.

  Holly smiled and nodded at the few individuals she passed, all but one of whom wer
e on-site security personnel. The only other staff behind The Wall at this hour were a small number of observers who kept a 24-hour watch on Chase Jackson and the others inside the Isolation Kompound. These workers watched uncut feeds rather than anything broadcast via the Terradox Live TV show, and the sanctity of the Buffer and its focused staff provided Holly a temporary but welcome respite from the persistent problem of Monica Pierce.

  After walking straight to Bo’s workshop door, Holly paused to look in through the small window panel at its centre.

  He was sitting in an ergonomic office chair, reclined back with his hands behind his head and his fingers drumming a rapid tune. It looked as though his eyes were focused squarely on a series of sketches and equations on a large whiteboard. Beyond him, Holly saw the thick glass which provided a direct view into Little Venus itself. Much of Bo’s work involved testing his rover designs within that harsh environment, and the only detail he had fought for during the zone’s design was an unobstructed view from his workshop.

  There was no getting away from the fact that a lot of people thought Bo was weird. He was anything but sociable with his colleagues, some of whom greatly resented his coldness and mistook his near-robotic focus on work-related tasks for an air of superiority; only those who had known him prior to the colony’s establishment knew that he had never been one for idle chit-chat or favouring company over seclusion.

  Some saw Bo’s relentlessly single-minded genius as an affliction, but Holly and the rest of his handful of close friends knew that he worked alone because he wanted to; his was a firm preference for solitude, rather than a pathological need.

  There had certainly never been any question as to where Bo would choose to pursue his research — Earth was a distant third and the Venus station barely further ahead in second, with Terradox being the only place he thought he would have the freedom, space and resources he desired. Since first setting foot in his purpose-built workshop, he had never regretted this decision for a single second.

  Holly knocked on the door three times and let herself in. Bo immediately spun around and couldn’t hide his surprise to see her. He checked the time on his wristband and looked even more surprised to learn how long he had been staring at his whiteboard in deep thought.

  “I won’t distract you for long,” Holly said from the doorway, “there’s just something I want to ask you about.”

  “It’s not about the access changes you’re making with these new intra-zonal restrictions, is it?”

  Holly closed the door and stepped fully inside. “It wasn’t,” she said. “But since you brought it up… what’s the general feeling around here?”

  “I’m probably not the best person to ask how other people are feeling about it, but I haven’t heard any negativity. When you work somewhere like this, you come to understand that safety can’t be compromised.”

  A slight grin crossed Holly’s face. “Which brings me to the question I came here to ask. Because from some of your ideas I’ve heard about — especially the ones for novel romotech applications — ‘safety first’ isn’t exactly the vibe I get.”

  “That’s different,” Bo replied, breaking into a brief grin of his own. “See, people make mistakes. So if you can introduce a system that reduces the chances of that happening, I’m all for it. And that’s the point: people make mistakes, but technology doesn’t. If something fails, it’s never the tech’s fault. Someone built the machine, someone wrote the program, someone executed the wrong command, someone is always behind whatever goes wrong. But if things are built properly and you have the right people in the right places, safety and innovation aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  “Bo, I know what you’ve been exploring. I was talking to Dimitar about our future focuses, and it came up. Do you really think a new romosphere is what we should be pursuing?”

  “Not necessarily as a priority,” Bo said in a neutral tone, seemingly both unsurprised that Holly had become aware of the idea and conscious of how far-out it sounded. “That’s why I didn’t tell you and it’s why I didn’t tell anyone else. I didn’t think Rusev would go for it so I was happy to go along with Dimitar’s plan of not mentioning it until he takes over. Hopefully that’s not too soon, obviously, because it’s only going to happen when she dies.”

  On a handful of occasions, Bo had relentlessly pushed for increased freedom in what kinds of romotech-related projects he was allowed to pursue. He and Holly had disagreed quite intensely on more than one occasion; but even in the instances when Bo didn’t get his way, he had never held a grudge or gone against her orders.

  Like too few others, Bo Harrington was someone whose word Holly could trust unconditionally. So when he stated his reason for having kept his ambitious idea to himself, she believed it.

  “Do you mind if I bring Sakura in to talk about this?” Holly asked. She knew that Sakura Otsuka often worked late into the night, testing and improving AI control systems within the rugged rovers Bo designed. Her office was only a few hundred metres from Bo’s workshop and provided a window to an area of Little Venus strewn with countless types of physical obstacles for the test rovers to overcome in an effort to ensure there could never be a repeat of anything like the situation their group encountered on Netherdox, when a crude adhesive moat had decommissioned their rover and endangered several lives. “I’m interested in hearing someone else’s gut reaction when they hear this idea for the first time, and she’s a highly qualified person we can trust to keep it quiet.”

  Bo shook his head. “She went home a few hours ago. She had a bad headache, but she seemed okay… I think it was maybe tiredness. She blamed it on dehydration but she has been working a lot more than usual lately. Ever since I gave her the first rover that can preserve animal life in there, she’s been working on its decision-making and problem-solving abilities.”

  “And you think it’s definitely just that?” Holly asked, a measure of concern in her tone given that she had never known Sakura to complain of headaches even during previous multi-week periods when she had worked on promising projects almost as obsessively as Bo worked on his own. “I haven’t really had a chance to catch up with her much in the last month or so. Has she said anything about, you know, maybe dating anyone or anything like that?”

  “Sakura isn’t all that much younger than you,” Bo said, very matter of factly. “I think it’s pretty safe to say that she’s probably too old to get pregnant by mistake.”

  Holly couldn’t help but laugh; this had been what she was hinting at, but Bo’s trademark bluntness had an unintentional humour to it. “I guess it’s just the two of us, then.”

  “Well, Sakura said she’ll come in tomorrow morning to catch up on what she’s missing tonight, but if you don’t want to wait then we can do it now. What do you want to know? I’m not particularly interested in Venus anymore and neither are you, so it seems to me like this would be an obvious next step for us.”

  Holly didn’t verbally take issue with Bo’s dismissal of her interest in Venus, as there was certainly some truth behind his words. But while she no longer saw much merit in Rusentra’s age-old goal of colonising the planet’s surface, her viewpoint diverged from Bo’s in still seeing a lot of potential value in exploring it. For this reason she supported a partial romoforming project which would aim to make Venus tolerable for a well-equipped exploration crew.

  In a prior discussion with someone else, she had used the metaphor of bygone shipwreck divers on Earth’s ocean floor: it was a lot easier to put on a diving suit and strap on an oxygen tank than it was to drain the oceans and walk right in. It made sense to use all available means to clear out any ravenous sharks which may have been roaming the area, she conceded, but that was all that had been necessary back then and remained all that was necessary now: to make sure no one died when they were down there… not to completely change the environment so they could stroll around without protective equipment.

  Fewer and fewer people now saw any real value in permanently colonisi
ng Venus, primarily because the core need for such a project had long since faded. The existence of both Terradox and the Venus station provided the ‘backup’ for humanity that many had quite reasonably desired, while the age-old concern of overpopulation had ceased to be an issue at all.

  A lot had changed since Roger Morrison uttered an infamous quote to express his opposition to the idea of seeking new frontiers rather than enacting decisive measures to control Earth’s population: “When your pockets are full of dirt, you don’t need bigger pockets.”

  Nowadays, overpopulation was no longer seen as a problem, largely due to the two decades of population decline caused by the famine Morrison covertly engineered and which the world had thankfully begun to rebound from. Any human activities on Venus would thus be elective rather than necessary, and no discussion of Venusian ambition would be complete without reference to the once-enticing possibility of a city in the clouds. But now that many thousands of people already lived on Terradox and in Venusian orbit on the station, it was rare to find anyone who thought that Rusentra’s sub-orbital floating labs should be joined by any permanent homes for non-researchers.

  The final issue which never failed to come up in these kinds of discussions regarded risk; more specifically, the risk of somehow damaging or even destroying Venus in the process of attempting to use romotechnology to reduce its atmospheric hostility to life. The chances of such a thing occurring were stupendously low, but the stakes were so high that it merited a degree of attention.