The Transcendents had once told Bruce he could live forever if he wanted to - the medichines could be programmed to halt the physical ageing process - and then in the same breath rather spoiled the idea by informing him there was a very real possibility he would go mad along the way if he did. They regaled him with stories of indoSkidians with infinite lifespans who often developed serious mental health issues and eventually had to be euthanised. However, the very existence of the Transcendents suggested there was another way forward. The knowledge that several hundred years down the track, Bruce would have options to extend his consciousness in a meaningful way was comforting.
Then, he slowly realised that Myfair had started to supplant him as his father’s right-hand man.
Bruce suspected his old man preferred working with Myfair rather than him. Myfair was unlikely to question Cyril's decisions and did what he was told without any argument. The old boy behaved like he still owned the family farm, forgetting he had sold it to Bruce for an exorbitant sum to fund his retirement. A retirement he had no interest in now, despite his wife’s grumblings about leaving the farm and moving to a house in town.
At one time, *Bruce had been the most sought-after person on the planet. However, the technology of the Transcendents had rendered him largely anonymous in the world, weaving a web of protection about him, and all those close to him. Also, global attention had moved on. He was no longer relevant to the institutions who had him in their sights: there were more newsworthy events going on elsewhere in a world obsessed by daily news cycles and instant gratification.
World attention was focused on the MFY program because it attracted thousands of mostly young people.
To promote this perception, the Martian Reality Show gave a lot of airtime to people enjoying the good life at the campus in South Australia. Another ambiguity nobody had commented on was how the program was planning to set up colonies on the moon and Mars but had reached out for Mars first. Bruce had considered they quietly can the moon settlement, but it was already fully operational, just waiting for its first wave of colonisers.
The Woomera complex was something of an enigma. No outsider really knew what was going on. Media organisations showed little interest in investigating space-related activities, and government agencies put no regulatory pressure on the MFY program.
The large asteroid called Automedon also still consumed media attention. Its appearance, and the possibility it might strike the planet and annihilate all living things on the earth’s surface, was a reminder of just how vulnerable Earth was to asteroid strikes. There were the usual loud noises about how the government should “do something about it”.
Automedon had swung into orbit around Earth, though no respectable astronomer could explain how this had happened, unless it was due to an external intervention. This gave conspiracy theorists plenty of ammunition. It was also claimed the asteroid was covered with structures built by aliens, an allegation supported by fuzzy photos taken at huge distances. The truth was difficult to establish, and the origin of these shapes remained speculation because nobody could get close enough to take a decent look at them and powerful telescopes were unable to focus properly on the structures as if some form of camouflage blanket had been thrown over them.
*More details can be found in The Lifeboat
NASA was busy putting a mission together, with support from every national and private agency on the planet that had space flight capability, to send a probe to the asteroid to determine if it was a danger to Earth or a treasure trove ripe for exploration.
If all this wasn’t enough, the latest United States election cycle had elevated the seemingly unelectable, and increasingly erratic, Ronald D Chump to the United States Presidency. The world’s population, along with most of America, didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Chump was a bigot and a bully of the worst order, who held extreme views on any subject known to mankind. He was a champion of Christian Family Values and law and order. He was also a hypocrite, and an easy target to manipulate, especially with a closet full of skeletons, a personal history of multiple marriages, prolific philandering, and illicit drug use.
General Smith and his team had discovered Chump had been a pawn at the centre of a decades-long conspiracy to place an agent into the highest levels of the American Government before the election and used this incriminating evidence to control him and do their bidding once they had helped him win. They were in possession of enough incriminating evidence on Chump to force him to dance naked through the Senate building if they wanted to.
Cold War era dark forces had cleverly manipulated him and smoothed his path to power and at one point it looked like it had succeeded their wildest dreams. But, once the miracle had happened, they discovered someone else was pulling Chump's strings.
Bruce knew he would have to be move quick, a jaunt to Mars was a good excuse to escape from the house, where there was always the risk he could be cornered by his mother or prospective mother in law and dragged away to check on an irrelevant detail of the wedding ceremony, or worse still, a trip to town to pass comment on the wedding dress.
The Transcendents had allowed him access to the full extent of their technology so he was able to travel the galaxy whenever he pleased, how he pleased. Getting himself to Mars in a hurry presented no problem at all. He could get there faster than he could get to the nearest dress shop.
He composed a quick text to Ngaio, letting her know what he was up to and when he expected to be back, and then activated his personal wormhole. Before he could draw a breath, he was standing amongst a stunned colony crew.
Now she’d had time to process the events of the last few hours, Janice wasn’t sure what the hell was going on.
The crew had just about convinced themselves they had fallen victim to an elaborate fake landing on Mars, stage managed by the MFY program. They had decided the bogus mission had been engineered to harvest millions of advertiser dollars via the reality television program.
The sight of the landing module coming into view was just showmanship. Despite her anger and frustration, Janice had to admit the attention to detail lavished on it was impressive. Still, it was just another clever artifice designed to keep the millions, perhaps billions, of viewers glued to their devices, willing the participants to succeed, yet half-expecting this to be the end of the road for their favourite crew member. Money would flood in when viewers donated to the cause or clicked on advertising links. Janice was just another mug who had been sucked in by all the MFY glitz and glamour.
Then Bruce materialised in their midst like a ghostly apparition beside Robert, who jumped in surprise and almost tripped over his feet in his haste to get out of the way. Janice was taken back by the arrival of this phantom. Then she realised it was a human, or a cleverly disguised alien... who had a strange smell about him.
“Who are you?” Janice demanded.
“I'm Bruce Harwood…”
“What is your role in this MFY Ponzi scheme?” Janice asked before he could elaborate further.
Bruce was a taken aback by her direct approach. Ponzi scheme? What was she on about?
“What do you mean, Ponzi scheme?”
“Are you part of the MFY organisation?”
“Sort of.”
“What do you mean, 'sort of'?” Bob demanded angrily. “What kind of answer is that?”
“Well for a start the MFY program isn’t quite what it seems,” Bruce replied.
“I knew it. You’re a bunch of frauds and liars. You can’t hold us against our will. If you can't get us to Mars, you need to let us go. Now.”
“Who said you’re not on Mars?”
The question stopped them all in their tracks.
“What do you mean?” Janice demanded suspiciously.
“The MFY program has its sights on colonising a planet. But the planet we are going to colonise is a lot further away than Mars. This landing, this settlement we have built here, and the one on the moon, are diversions to allow us a bit of br
eathing space while we pursue our primary objective.”
Bruce’s response was met with varying degrees of amusement and disbelief. Bruce was obviously a member of a sect or group of nutcases. Wealthy and well-connected nutcases, because this set up wouldn’t be cheap to create.
“So, who are they?” Bob pointed to the lander on the video feed. Just visible in the exit hatch was the leg of a space suit, stretching out to place a foot on the surface. “Robert should be stepping out of the lander and he’s standing beside me.” Bob pointed at Robert.
“The crew of the lander are androids. Apart from their internal plumbing they are exact copies of you. They’re very advanced technology: they will take your place while we move into the next phase of our plan.”
“You mean these androids are going to imitate us on the MFY Reality Show?”
Bruce was winging it now as one by one, the androids emerged from the lander, planted the MFY mission flag, stood solemnly around it for a few moments, and then and marched off to another part of the settlement.
“Pretty much.”
“What's going to become of us?” Janice asked, nervously. Not too long ago she had been happy to risk life and limb perched atop a chemical rocket and be blasted into space to begin a long, hazardous journey to Mars. She would have died happy if it had blown up on the launch platform, or there had been a problem on the outbound journey. Now she was desperate to extend her life for as long as possible. “Are you going to eliminate us?”
“No, no, don’t be concerned about your personal safety. We’re going to need every able-bodied person we can lay our hands on. However, your ultimate destination isn’t Mars,” Bruce repeated, without elaborating.
“So where are we then?”
“This is Mars, believe me,” Bruce reiterated, “and there is no going back to your old lives.”
“If you'll pardon my French, can you explain what the fuck is going on? If the MFY program is a front, what’s it a front for? And how can you prove we’re on Mars? How the bloody hell can we be on Mars if that’s our lander out there?” Janice pointed to the monitor. “I’m saying it’s ours because the serial number on the side of it matches the one we were supposed to descend to the surface on.”
“You got here via a wormhole, the same way I did. I think the Transcendents must have slowed down the trip for you and timed your arrival to coincide with the lander’s decent.”
“You have got to be kidding. Wormholes are still a theoretical construct. Nobody has worked out the physics yet. A working model, one we can reliably use for space travel, is years, decades away. So, don’t give me that bullshit.”
“What’s a Transcendent?” one of the other crew members asked. “And where is your space suit?”
Bruce realised he should have taken the time to dress appropriately. He had spent the morning drenching lambs, dressed in a pair of old jeans and a tee shirt. Smelling of sweat, sheep shit and lanoline, he didn’t look or smell like your average space traveller.
“I haven’t got time to talk much now. I just thought I had better try and explain the situation to you briefly and above all tell you not to panic. Everything will become clear once we have had an opportunity to inform you fully.” Bruce paused, waiting for a response. When he didn’t get one he continued. “The Transcendents are the group behind the MFY Foundation, a very large and wealthy organisation and we are going to colonise a planet which is outside our solar system, Mars and the moon are just stepping stones,” he repeated because he knew that in the mental state the crew were in repetition was the only way to get his message across. “Automedon was injected into orbit around Earth for a reason.” he continued. “It’s going to be used as a staging post for wormholes which will transport people to the colony planet on the other side of the galaxy.”
“You must be joking. We just don’t have this kind of technology yet, and we should know. Don’t you understand?”
“How can you prove this?” one of the other colonists demanded.
“I can’t, really,” Bruce admitted. “At least not right now. However, you can’t get out of here, but I can, because I have my own personal wormhole.”
Bruce activated his wormhole and set emergence coordinates for the other side of the room. He hoped it would work. It would be a little embarrassing if it didn’t, because the technology was a bit buggy and the emergence points were sometimes a little inaccurate. He hadn’t been left high and dry yet, but there had been a few trips where the end of the wormhole hadn’t ended up quite where he planned. He certainly didn’t want to end up outside on the surface of Mars without protection.
Bruce vanished, reappearing across the room almost instantaneously.
“See?”
“Fancy trick!” Janice suspected sleight of hand, a clever deception. She walked over to Bruce and touched him on the arm to see if he was real. “You could be an android for all we know.”
“I could be,” Bruce agreed, “but I’m not.”
“What would happen if we opened the doors? I am sure we could if we tried hard enough.”
“Just make sure everyone has a suit on, and you know how to use the airlock, or you'll decompress the whole place and kill yourselves.”
He said it so matter of factly, Janice decided she wouldn’t take any chances until she was completely confident of her whereabouts, even at the risk of looking stupid if she walked out onto a movie set in her space suit.
Bruce hoped none of them would try and escape. They had trained extensively for sorties out onto the Martian surface, but he wasn’t sure what would happen if they came face to face with android copies of themselves, or if their suits weren't fit for purpose. It would also cause a shitload of confusion with the television audience. Surely the Transcendents and the MPU had considered this?
“What are we supposed to do then?”
“Have a good rest, familiarise yourselves with this part of the facility, and please, don’t panic. We’ll get some instructions to you very soon and we'll be in touch to help you carry them out. Remember that you're not here by accident and you're not in any danger.” Bruce paused, then continued. “Look, I have to go so I’ll see you later.”
Before Janice and any of her fellow crew members could protest, Bruce beamed himself back to his office.
Seven
“I know this sounds bloody unlikely, but here goes anyway. Some time back, my mate Bruce was abducted by aliens, the people who live on this planet.”
“That’s the one of the stupidest things I have ever heard in my life!” Morris laughed. “You expect me to believe that?” he added, between gusts of laughter. “What’s this got to do with me? You’re winding me up. Right?” He half-expected a camera crew to leap out from behind a bush and yell; “Surprise, surprise, we gotcha!”
Except there were no bushes to hide behind, just endless grasslands stretching away to the horizon in three directions, with the hint of a city skyline in the other, which they were moving away from, to Morris’s growing discomfort.
“It’s true, I tell you,” Trev insisted. He was a little hurt that Morris didn’t believe him, because he had spent hours getting his spiel down pat.
“Prove it!” Morris snorted. He was becoming increasingly uneasy about the situation. He didn't have an over-active imagination. He'd thought he was having a nightmare, but now he knew he wasn’t dreaming. It was surreal, none the less.
“I can’t right now. Once we get to the settlement, you'll see that we aren’t on Earth. It’s going to be a little hard to prove straight away, but...”
“What do you mean?” Morris stared at Trevor, wondering how he could escape from this nutter. He decided to wait until they got to a built-up area and he could flag down a cop.
Trev drew a deep breath and started a rambling potted history of the events leading up their meeting. “To cut a very long story short, like I said, Bruce was abducted by aliens from this planet. It’s called Skid. At the time Skid was experiencing a creeping natural disaste
r, a drought or famine, I’m not entirely sure which, and they needed Bruce's help.”
None of this made any sense to Morris. “If they could travel to Earth in a spaceship, surely, they would have the capability to fix the situation somehow, grow food synthetically? You expect me to believe this fairy tale?”
“Well, it's complicated. Anyway,” Trev continued his garbled explanation, “the aliens who inhabited this planet were humans, just like you and I, most of whom ended up dying. Somehow Bruce and his girlfriend Sue made it home.” Trev didn’t mention that Sue was now his partner. He didn’t feel the need to elaborate. He always got a little embarrassed when he explained the situation, because he felt it suggested he was only good for Bruce’s cast-offs.
“At some point later in the piece, one of the hereditary leaders, a guy named Myfair, who had been off-planet for most of the period after Bruce’s kidnapping, decided to track Bruce down and bring him back to Skid to help straighten things out. Myfair was acting on the direction of the real aliens because I don’t think he’d have the gumption to think of it himself.” A pretty rich comment coming from Trev. “The real aliens trusted Bruce for some reason and they wanted him back up here.”
“Real aliens? Have I missed something? You still haven’t explained to me how they could have a famine if they are sophisticated enough to send a spaceship to Earth.”
“I’m getting to that. Somehow along the way they also managed to get President Mitchell, the former United States President, involved.”
“Bullshit. President Mitchell died months ago.”
“He didn't. He’s alive and well, and you can meet him in a few minutes.”
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but this is nonsense. Tell me the truth.”
“Well to cut a long story short, it appears the people Bruce believed were aliens weren’t the real Skidians after all.”
The Colonists Page 6
