The Venus station, in the planet’s orbit, would quite obviously be destroyed by any planetary-scale destructive event. The relatively trivial effect of Venus’s gravity on Earth, meanwhile, meant that any danger to the majority of humanity would depend on the potential explosiveness of any destruction, since Earth could — in theory — be fatally impacted by Venusian ejecta.
Some saw the mere existence of such a danger, however remote, as enough to write off the very notion of romoforming Venus and with it any hopes of making ground exploration possible within years rather than decades. Those with such a view preferred the option of a decades-long approach using old-school terraforming techniques which had their heyday in the realm of twentieth-century science fiction.
Holly paid no attention to this viewpoint, instead maintaining the superiority of conservatively paced applications of scaled-up versions of the kind of environmental romotech that had been conceptually proven as both safe and effective on Earth in processing ocean-borne waste and purifying smog-filled air.
“Remember when we first talked about this,” Bo said, “back when I said that terraforming Venus when we could romoform it would be like an old farmer choosing to plough his field with a horse instead of a tractor? Well now that we have the ability to literally fabricate a new colony if we decide that we want one, cleaning up Venus to live there when we could custom-design somewhere new would be like farming a field of corn instead of cultivating fortified algae. We can do amazing things without too much effort, and I really think we should look into the pros and cons of making another Terradox.”
“You know what people will say,” Holly sighed, appearing willing to consider Bo’s words but unable to shake the obvious objections. “They’ll say Netherdox was too close a call for a new romosphere to be something worth thinking about… and you’ll say Netherdox itself wasn’t an inherent threat, it was the poor security measures that let a madman hijack its growth… and they’ll say that when the cost of the worst-case scenario disaster could be human extinction, there’s nothing to discuss.”
Bo shrugged. “And do you know what I’d say to that? If that’s the absolute truth and the cost of another romospheric hijacking — however impossible that really is — is something so unpalatable that we can’t even think about making a new romosphere, then this romosphere should have been destroyed before we built the colony. Because every single safeguard that’s in place here could be in place for any new romosphere, and nothing we did would have to work around the archaic systems that Morrison set up in the first place. We’d have a genuine blank slate, limited only by our imagination.”
For the first time, Holly seemed to be giving it some serious thought. “In one sentence, tell me why you want this. What kind of research is it that you could do there but not here? Because I’m assuming it is about research…”
“One sentence?” Bo echoed. “Okay. I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up too high about something that could be a long time away from being realised, but this isn’t just about research. It’s not even mainly about research. So… one sentence?”
“In your own time,” Holly chuckled.
Bo nodded. “I want to fabricate a new romosphere, I want to live on it, I want it to be independently mobile, and I want to set it on a course to the stars. I want it to be a generation ship, Holly. I want it to be the ultimate generation ship. It will feel like we’re on Earth and the population could be just as vast and just as varied, but we’ll be expanding our reach. I honestly think it would be more like a second and mobile Earth than a second Terradox. And do you know the best part? From there, we could make more. If we do this, we can literally go forth and multiply. Forget Venus; we can conquer the stars.”
“Independently mobile?” Holly said, picking out one phrase and responding a lot more flatly than Bo had hoped and expected.
“All I mean is that I want to be able to tell it exactly where to go and I want it to be able to take us there, not for it to be ultimately bound by orbital mechanics like this place. And however far-fetched it sounds to propel something on this kind of scale, we both know what Nisha Kohli was working on before she went into the Kompound. Hypothetically, if Nisha has worked all that stuff out and we combine her idea for a romotech reactor with my idea for a new romosphere, it could take us anywhere. Romosphere isn’t even the word… to use Dimitar’s terminology, we would have a Kosmosphere on our hands.”
Holly was quiet for several seconds. “And you’ve told no one else about this? Dimitar told you and you told no one?”
“Christian Jackson,” Bo said. “I didn’t mean to, but it came up in conversation. We can trust him, though. You should go and see him now. Not even just about this, but to look at the microspheres I helped him out with. He needed small areas of the Botanical Gardens to have vastly different conditions, and the microspheres have held well.”
“I know, I approved them,” Holly laughed. “You showed me the plans and explained the safeguards, remember? Christian does usually call them bubbles instead of microspheres, but I know all about them.”
“Oh yeah,” Bo said. “So how about I draw up some plans for this new thing, and then you can think about approving it, too? The microspheres, bubbles, whatever you want to call them, they were a novel application of romotech — just like a Kosmosphere would be. The scale is different, but the principles are the same. Okay, we were changing conditions within an already safe atmosphere, but the point stands. To test it, we could develop noxious conditions within one microsphere and then make an inner microsphere with a safe atmosphere. In fact…” Bo trailed off, his eyes lighting up.
“Yeah?”
“We could do it here! Inside Little Venus! The next astronaut test could be inside a microsphere in that hellhole, instead of inside a physical protective structure like the Kompound. What do you say?”
This time Holly laughed fully as she turned to the door. “I say let’s just focus on one thing at a time, okay? I’ll talk to Christian about how the microspheres have been functioning, but don’t expect anything to happen too quickly. I need to talk to him about Chase, anyway, because everything around here is going to change completely when the isolation test is over. Once Chase and Nisha come out and everything settles down again, we’ll see where we stand with new applications of romotech. Deal?”
“Deal,” Bo said. “Big day tomorrow, too, with these access changes. Like I said, people here seem okay with it, but I don’t know about everyone else. All I know is that Viola—”
“She’s made her views more than clear,” Holly interrupted, decisively ending that line of discussion. “And since it’s after midnight, Christian won’t be at work so I’ll have my chat with him tomorrow. This is interesting, Bo, I’ll give you that, but a lot of people are going to have a lot of concerns.”
“What about you?” he asked. “Gut reaction?”
Holly hesitated, consciously non-committal. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“Sure thing,” Bo nodded. “It sounds like tomorrow really will be a big day.”
For once, and not for the best, Bo Harrington had no idea just how right he was.
twelve
As he often did, Chase Jackson entered the Isolation Kompound’s privacy room to get some thoughts off his mind before retiring to bed for the night.
This room contained the only visible camera in the Kompound — the rest were built into the structure, with the test subjects knowing they were there but not exactly where — but it had become a welcome refuge for Chase and his colleagues.
The room and its conspicuous camera were intended to make the subjects feel like they could take a break when they needed one, and to give them an outlet to express themselves with the assurance that their comments would never be made public.
The privacy room’s door only locked when one person was inside; if its sensors detected that there were no people inside, or indeed more than one, the digital lock would not engage. There were a few reasons behind this d
ecision to ensure that no sub-group could separate itself from the rest of the subjects, chief among which was a desire to avoid creating any circumstances which could potentially encourage fragmentation on one hand and irresponsible physical intimacy on the other.
The privacy room had done its job so far, and Chase had made more use of it than anyone else. He tended to enter at one of the same few times each day, when his closest friends within the Kompound — Nisha and Marcel — were either asleep or fully engaged in experimentation. Nisha’s work was never done but was almost entirely research-based and theoretical, whereas Marcel’s was far more practical and typically involved around eight hours of full-on and uninterruptible focus per day. Marcel set his own hours, which was acceptable to everyone as long as he got the work done, and since the very early days of the test he had tried to make his working hours coincide with Chase’s so they could share as much of their downtime as possible.
Chase’s own work usually occurred in partnership with Steve Shepherd, another young prospective astronaut who had been the candidate most tipped to captain future missions prior to the beginning of the test. The two got on well and enjoyed their flight training as much as their physical training, competing fiercely but good-heartedly in both departments so consistently that both had gained a considerable amount of muscle in the past year, to the extent that Grav joked that they now looked more like recruits for Peter’s Security division than for Holly’s astronaut training program.
While Chase was tall and well-proportioned, cutting the figure of an old-fashioned lumberjack or farm hand with the functional strength to match, Steve tended to over-focus on certain muscle groups. His stockiness, allied to his penchant for bicep-building and neck-strengthening exercises, led some to comment that he looked more than a little bit like a young version of Grav. The tall and scrawny Marcel, on the other hand, looked like he had never seen a gym in his life.
The three men in the Kompound got along well with each other, and the two large personalities among them — Chase and Steve — rarely came to any non-trivial disagreements. When they did, however, the dominance hierarchy became abundantly clear: Chase, who never had to raise his voice to be heard, was very much in charge. On operational matters, Marcel officially called the shots; but in reality, as the months went by, he had increasingly come to lean on Chase.
Chase’s rise to this position within the group surprised many on the outside who had expected Steve to emerge in such a way, but none were disappointed; for although Steve Shepherd failed to exude an air of natural leadership and was no longer viewed as future captain material, Chase Jackson ticked all of the right boxes and had connected with the viewing public in a way that made space exploration seem cool again.
In recent days, though, as the end of the test drew tantalisingly near, concerns had surfaced over Steve’s display of some mildly disconcerting behavioural tics which would likely exclude him from future missions, let alone their captaincy.
Parallel to Chase’s own harmless habit of crossing off the days on his calendar, Steve had become disconcertingly focused on a roof-based light in the centre of the Kompound which flashed off and back on every six hours to indicate that the observation crew in the Buffer had changed shifts. This was the only form of contact the subjects received from the outside world, and had been included at Jillian Jackson’s suggestion as a way of reassuring the subjects that all was well on Terradox and that they hadn’t been abandoned. There were precedents of similarly regular ‘all is well’ signals being used to good effect during smaller-scale isolation tests on Earth, as Jillian made clear during the planning stages.
After some initial misgivings that it would taint the isolation aspect of the test, Holly soon came to accept Jillian’s reasoning that while this kind of light-based comfort blanket naturally wouldn’t be present should the subjects ever be truly isolated, their survival in such an instance wouldn’t be wholly dependent on the functioning of an artificial environment and the attentiveness of its keepers. In short, the subjects’ safety depended on the safety and attentiveness of their minders on the outside; and because of this, an un-intrusive six-hourly confirmation that everything was fine on Terradox and that the Kompound was still being monitored was ultimately seen as a sensible measure.
The light had been a complete non-issue until very recently, when Steve happened to walk under it shortly after it flashed to mark a shift-change in the Buffer’s observation room. He missed it by a few seconds but insisted to Chase that he had been there precisely on the hour, and grew increasingly agitated as the minutes passed with no flash.
In an effort to keep Steve’s emotions in check and to prevent his anxiety from spreading throughout the Kompound, Chase agreed to sit with him until the light flashed and promised that he would declare an emergency and initiate the thirty-minute evacuation procedure if it didn’t flash at the next six-hour marker.
It did, of course, and Steve breathed a sigh of relief while thanking Chase for calming him down. That had been the moment when Chase cemented his position as the group’s leader and when Steve unknowingly disqualified himself from future consideration. Unfortunately, what it hadn’t been was the decisive mind-easing moment it appeared at the time.
The next morning, Chase woke to see Steve staring at the light three minutes before it was scheduled to flash. He tried to tempt Steve away from it, knowing that any habit of waiting for the flash could soon become obsessive, but Steve resisted in a way that suggested he might have turned aggressive if Chase didn’t leave him be. Ultimately, Chase decided that the best way to react was by walking away, which not only prevented a conflict but also showed Steve that he really did know there was nothing to worry about.
“The light has flashed at the right time four times a day for the last three-hundred-and-fifty-plus days,” he said, trying to sound light-hearted while internally growing concerned about Steve’s state of mind. “They’re not going to leave us hanging now, dude.”
On that occasion, Steve rejoined Chase right after the on-time flash and laughed about his own uncertainty, vowing that his mind was now settled. Needless to say, however, Steve’s eyes were back on the light just under six hours later.
This time Chase opted to do nothing; his faith in the timing of the flashes was total, so he believed there was no real danger of Steve’s concerns turning to manic fear. But while Steve’s concerns hadn’t necessarily deepened since then, he had taken to observing the light from longer and longer before the flash was due. The others tried to take little notice of him, heeding Chase’s advice to leave Steve to it and crucially to never show a similar interest in the timing of the flash while Steve was there. Unfortunately, though, it was becoming increasingly difficult to avoid conversations about it now that Steve had taken to sitting under the light, in a high traffic area at the centre of the Kompound, a full thirty minutes before each flash.
During Chase’s frequent trips to the diary room, this was the main thing he now talked about. Tonight was no exception, with Steve already in position to witness the next flash.
“We’re so close to the end,” Chase said, leaning back with his hands resting on the back of his neck and his eyes fixed on the camera. “We’ve done all the work you wanted us to do and the group has held up well. Our only problem is Steve’s obsession with that damn light, which wouldn’t be here if this was a real mission, so if there’s something else you think I should be doing to deal with this, I think you should be telling me. Okay, if we were really isolated there would be no communication. But there would also be no light turning one of my crew into… I dunno… a guy who doesn’t feel safe unless he sees a light flashing every six hours. I’m on top of this, but like I said: if there’s anything else you want me to do to deal with this artificial problem that your setup has created…” Chase trailed off and pointed up to a speaker on the ceiling which had never emitted so much as a whisper. “That’s all I’m saying.”
None of Chase’s words would be broadcast —
the privacy room was a private space — and not even Monica Pierce and her Terradox Live production crew were privy to the room’s AV feed. This hadn’t always been the case, but the feed had been separated from the others ever since Monica flagrantly broke the cardinal rule to refrain from broadcasting anything from the privacy room six months earlier by airing some comments from Chase which explicitly confirmed that he had feelings for Nisha Kohli. Chase’s feelings came as news to no one and caused no real harm, but Holly had nevertheless been furious at Monica’s insolent rule-breaking and responded by revoking her production team’s access to the privacy room’s AV feed and issuing a formal warning against future misconduct.
After making his thoughts clear on the light situation, Chase waited in silence for a full two minutes.
He knew someone would be watching and listening, but he wasn’t holding out much hope for a response. Indeed, when none came, he took it as a sign that the observers must have thought he was handling Steve’s behaviour quite well.
Chase then made his way through the quiet Kompound until he reached the central corridor, on the way to his bedroom. As expected, Steve was still there. The clock reported that just two minutes remained until the light was due to flash again.
“Almost there,” Steve said. He sounded calm enough — chipper, even — and wore a relaxed expression.
“Exactly,” Chase replied without stopping. “You know it’s coming, so why do you need to see it?”
“No harm in making sure,” Steve said.
Chase wanted to say ‘and what would you do if it didn’t flash?’, but wisely thought better of it. Instead, he settled for encouraging Steve to get some sleep, then headed down the corridor.
As Chase arrived in his room, he glanced at the clock. Twenty-six seconds remained until the end of the current six-hour block, at which point a shift changeover in the Buffer’s observation room would see the staff press a button to let the test subjects know that all was well. This occurred whether anyone was near the light or not — it was a test of the observation team’s attentiveness and professionalism, in a secondary sense — and no one who happened to be passing the light near the changeover time had ever reported it flashing any more than a few seconds early or late.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 73
