The Colonists

by Keith Fenwick

  All standard stuff: day to day, nothing much changed, except for today when he watched the Martian Reality Show feed while he had his breakfast.

  They were on camera all the time, and they had long since got used to the cameras following them everywhere they went. The only time they could be certain about complete privacy was when they were going about their business in the toilet. Footage of people going about their ablutions was not good television apparently, but everything else was fair game. In all fairness, the cameras didn’t dwell on people having sex either. Robert also knew that if you kept quiet, the cameras would focus on the more gregarious colonists.

  This morning it had been Robert’s turn to give a brief pep talk about how life was going, some of the challenges they had, and provide an update on how some of their experiments were progressing and making sure he managed to plug some of the key sponsor’s product without it being too obvious. Robert’s main job in the settlement was environmental management, so he always talked about how important it was to maintain a constant internal temperature, and the daily challenges the settlement faced keeping the place clean.

  Once his media duties were out of the way, he had sat down to eat his meal before it got cold. Or had he? Was he just imagining the pep talk with Earth? The messages from home?

  The feed playing in the background was normal enough. It showed them all going through their daily routines cutting backwards and forwards from real time to retrospectives.

  The cameras had followed him after he threw the light cover off the bed and rolled out of it, but there was a cut to someone else, Bill as it happened, while Robert conducted what he liked to call his morning constitutional. When he was younger this was the time he liked to relax with a book or magazine, but he had long discarded that habit.

  Then the cameras had returned to him when he started his exercise period, then followed him to the shower, and on to him waking the woman in his bed.

  “Have you seen Janice?” he asked Bill. He realised he hadn’t seen her for a while.

  Bill nodded thoughtfully but didn’t reply.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Robert asked, still watching the television. Bill responded with a frown, suggesting there was something amiss with Robert.

  The camera had followed Robert into the communal area while he had selected his porridge from the meal selector and then warmed it in the microwave while providing his update.

  It was an odd sensation watching himself on the screen, staring at the microwave, and he realised for the first time there was a significant time delay in the feed he hadn’t noticed before. Then the penny dropped.

  On television he was eating and happily chatting away to Janice, who had got out of bed and followed him into the communal area. She worked different shifts, but they always tried to have a meal together twice a day.

  However, beside him, in real time, he had Bill for company. He dropped the spoon in his porridge and turned to Bill.

  “Are you seeing what I am seeing?”

  Bill didn’t respond and kept on munching his porridge as if Robert hadn’t spoken.

  “It’s a different scene to what we are actually living.” Robert pointed at the screen and double checked the time stamp rolling along the bottom like a tickertape. It was clearly the same date and time displayed on the main mission clock on the wall, but something was amiss. There might have been a lag between camera and stream of a few seconds, but not one this long. “I’m not sure what’s happening here, but I am pretty sure there are not two of me in the program.”

  Bill still didn’t seem to hear him as he finished off his own meal and stood up, an action not captured by the cameras and the live television feed Robert was watching.

  Nothing made sense to Robert. Not Bill’s behaviour, or that of all the other people sharing the table and scattered about the room, who were going about their business in slow motion.

  “We were planning to plant an explosive charge you made against the airlock, so we could blow it open to try to find out if we were on Mars. It seems a stupid idea now. Do you remember any of this?” Robert asked Bill, who hadn’t moved.

  “Vaguely. But I can’t remember if it worked or not. It seems like a long time ago. Where is all this going?” Bill asked, suddenly becoming more animated than he had been all morning.

  “Well correct me if I am wrong, but the feed on the television isn’t showing what we are doing now.” Robert indicated the screen, turning to look up at Bill. “Janice is in shot, but she isn’t even in the room,” he added.

  “I’m not sure what you’re seeing but that's not what I’m looking at,” Bill replied, pointing at the screen. “I really think you should visit the medical module and get yourself checked out,” he repeated dully, the brief spark of energy he had displayed a moment earlier had been extinguished.

  Robert swung his head around to see what was happening on screen and sure enough there he was, with Bill standing beside him. “What the fuck? How can this be?” The image had changed, and the signal lag had vanished.

  He stared at Bill for a few moments. Bill didn’t sound like the man he knew. This Bill sounded like a querulous, feeble old man who wasn’t as sharp as he used to be and was struggling to come to terms with it. Robert realised Bill wasn’t going to be any help and judging by the dull expressions of everyone else, neither were they.

  He had originally believed they were all still on Earth. However, now he wasn’t convinced. Maybe they had been drugged, sedated for some reason. This would be a dangerous thing to do if they were on Mars when they needed their wits about them. Even if they weren’t on Mars, why would the Martian Reality Show be using pre-recorded material for the live telecast? Or did all of them have carefully built or sculpted doubles somewhere else? If this was the case, the cost of plastic surgery to create passable body doubles must have been enormous. But why go to all that trouble?

  Just in case you didn’t survive the journey to Mars, came a voice. Robert whipped his head around to see where the voice came from. I’m a subroutine of the computer management system running the infrastructure of a planet called Skid. You may call me Bert.

  “A planet called Skid? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  The voice didn’t respond, and Robert experienced an instant's disorientation, followed by a tumbling sensation. The next thing he knew he was picking himself up off the ground where he had been unceremoniously dumped on his backside. He gasped for breath and started to panic about the lack of a space suit or breathing apparatus, then quickly realised he could breathe normally.

  Presumably this was Skid, the only thing he was sure of was he was standing in a paddock, a field maybe in the middle of nowhere.

  In the distance, he glimpsed the outline of a built-up area and for want of any better idea started walking in that general direction.

  The smell of freshly mown grass filled his nostrils and he could see pieces of cut grass had stuck to his feet and legs.

  A loud thump beside him made him jump in surprise. He looked around and discovered his personal effects bag had followed. He picked it up and slung it over his shoulder, brushing away a few grass clippings from the bottom of the bag as he did so.

  He sensed movement out of the corner of his eye and saw a small truck was headed toward him, bouncing across the grassy field. Robert wasn’t sure what to do next. Initially he wanted to run or hide. His next worrying thought was realising he couldn’t outpace the truck, and secondly there was no place to hide.

  “What just happened?” he demanded.

  You’re on Skid, Bert confirmed.

  Back on Mars, Bill Sugden sat down again and munched away quite happily on Robert’s half eaten bowl of porridge. He hadn’t batted an eyelid at Robert’s sudden disappearance.

  “Where or what is Skid?”

  Skid was always your ultimate destination.

  “You what? You expect me to believe you?” As he replied, something niggled in the back of his mind. This wasn’t the fi
rst time he had heard of Skid and the real purpose of their mission. He remembered how he had originally ignored the idea because it sounded preposterous at the time. However, now a frisson of uncertainty crept into his thinking and he decided to keep an open mind.

  “When was it decided we would be sent here instead of Mars and who made this decision?” Robert demanded.

  The MFY program has always been about delivering tens of thousands of healthy, fertile bodies to this planet.

  “I don’t believe you.” Robert said desperately, “the whole Mars mission could have been faked. Once we arrived at the settlement on Mars I thought we’d all been had, and now I know.”

  Before Robert could take this line of enquiry further the small truck rolled to a stop beside him.

  “Robert!” A familiar voice called out, and the passenger’s side door of the vehicle was flung open before it became completely stationary, and a woman emerged. “I’ve missed you so much,” Janice called as she ran around the bonnet and gave him a hug and showered him with passionate kisses. “Oh, I have missed you!” she repeated, and then stood back to look at him, still holding both his hands in her own.

  “Janice?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised! You’re looking good.”

  Not sure of himself, Robert drew her towards him and returned her hug. Looking over the top of her head, he caught sight of an expression of pure hatred on the face of a man who emerged from the vehicle. Robert realised he had made an enemy before they had even been introduced.

  “Where are we? Is this really you?”

  “Yes, it’s really me and we’re on a planet called Skid. Here, meet Zarif.. Zarif Khan. Zarif, meet Robert, we were on Mars together. Zarif is also a member of our small colony and arrived about the same time I did.”

  Robert eyed Zarif warily but held out his hand. Zarif took Robert’s hand and give it a weak shake. “I don’t remember seeing you at Woomera or Mars?”

  “Zarif isn’t from the MFY program like us, he’s an economic migrant from Libya. Look, it’s a long story. Let’s get you home and we can explain.”

  “But what about the people on Mars? Are you and I still there?” Robert was confusing real life with what he had seen moments ago on the news feedback on the Mars colony.

  “Don’t worry, this is the real you. The people back home are seeing androids, very clever robots. Good enough to fool anyone back on Earth.”

  “But why?”

  “First things first. If you thought getting to Mars was an achievement, you’ll never believe how far away we are from Earth now. This is going to be way better.”

  Robert decided to delay judgement because he wasn’t sure what to believe.

  “What about the others back on Mars and the moon?”

  Janice hesitated. “We sort of forgot them in all the excitement. They’ll be brought here when the time is right,” Janice assured him. “The rest of the MFYers are already here or on their way.”

  Robert kept his mouth closed and his thoughts to himself and wondered how pleased Janice really was to see him.

  “How come I’m here then?”

  “I’m not sure. The same thing happened to me. I think they were using some form of mind control, sedatives in our food or something, to stop us from doing anything stupid like going outside the settlement. We thought we had been well trained but believe me, we know diddly squat. Our whole mission was stage managed.” Janice paused to let him catch up because she could see Robert was having trouble coming to terms with this information.

  “The entire process is a bit hit and miss. There are other people like us where the controls appear to have slipped. I think we were yanked before we disrupted the teams we were in, making trouble by telling them everything they had worked so hard for was a complete sham.”

  Robert glanced at Zarif. “And him?”

  “Pretty much the same, except he was on a ship in the Mediterranean on the way to Italy. He was uploaded to Automedon after the ship foundered. He didn’t realise it was Automedon at the time, and then he ended up here. We were like a little advance party.”

  “Is this true?” Robert asked Zarif who now stood beside them.

  “Yes,” Zarif replied with a shrug, “It seems that way. I was here a few days then many people arrived, and I recognised some from my village. We all took the same ship. They now live in the city over there.” Zarif gestured towards the faint outline of a city barely visible in the distance. “I go and see them sometimes. Most of them are not sure if they are happy in this new land and they think the westerners have played some sort of trick on them.”

  “So how come they just sent me? I reckon Bill Sugden was on the verge of waking up too.” Robert went on to describe the sensation he'd had of fog clearing from his mind.

  “Yeah, he might have, but I think they put him under again. It’s for his own good,” she insisted, a little too glibly for Robert who was prone to think the worst about any situation.

  The truth was much simpler, and Janice had already alluded to it. They hadn’t been completely forgotten, they just weren’t in line for the first phase of the upload project. They were a loose end to be tied up at some stage after the excitement of the main upload. Robert would still be on Mars if he hadn’t spontaneously managed to overcome the heavy sedatives he and all the other crew had been given.

  “Come on, let’s get back to where we are staying and get you sorted out,” Janice said. “We’ll jump up on the back,” she added, to the driver of the vehicle who poked his head out the window.

  “Hi.” Morris greeted Robert. “You probably don’t recognise me, but I was inducted into the Woomera site with you. My name is Morris.. Morris Thwaites.”

  Robert looked at Morris. “I don’t recall meeting you...”

  “Don’t worry, jump in the back and we’ll get you settled.”

  Robert followed Janice’s lead as she put a foot on the rear wheel and heaved herself over the side. He stood beside her facing forward, grasping the rail running along the width of the roof. He glanced down and saw his shoes and the cuffs of his overalls were covered in grass clippings.

  Zarif hesitated, then quickly clambered over on onto the deck to stand on Janice’s other flank so she was sandwiched between the two men.

  Seven

  Bruce had been jotting down the tasks he wanted to complete for the day. It was a very short list. He sucked on the end of his ballpoint pen. Surely there was more? He stared at video feeds of cameras from all over Skid displayed on the wall of his office, the screens constantly cycling through scenes from the major population centres, searching for inspiration. There was little of any note happening anywhere. Some idiot was grandstanding in the senate and a few of the first wave of newSkidians were venturing out from their little enclaves, linking up with other newcomers and encountering the odd indoSkidian. These chance encounters resolved peacefully after a brief staring match, with each side unsure how to respond.

  He struggled to come up with more than a handful of bullet points while he tried to figure out what it was he wanted to achieve, and how to go about it. He was beginning to wonder if the effort was worth the time and energy he was applying. Maybe he should just wing it. Trusting his instincts had worked well for him before.

  The Transcendents were keen - desperate, in fact - for him to be involved in the future governance of Skid, putting in place some basic principles and trying to set Lake up for success, without really communicating what it had in mind. The Transcendents had even less of an idea what was required than Bruce did, and advising on any form of control system was a long way from being one of his core competencies.

  He had once had a view that politics was a haven for people who couldn’t hack it in the real world, but he now had a much more realistic view. He understood most politicians, apart from the real dingbats, at least had a vision for making the world a better place and not leaving it any worse off after their time in office, even if Bruce disagreed with their ideology and their obv
ious lust for power.

  Even fuckwits like Chump must have once been driven to do great works, before they were beaten down and held accountable by big donors, and an electorate increasingly polarised between two vastly diverse world views. A confused electorate, large swathes of whom seemed to regularly vote for candidates who were hell bent on exploiting them and removing hard won protections and benefits they relied upon for their day to day survival.

  Well, maybe not in Chump’s case, because it was hard to believe he had ever had an original thought in his life.

  Bruce knew his own personal limitations and how these shortcomings precluded him from involvement in any form of governance and political activity. He continued to suck on his pen and make a few notes, and it struck him the art of politics and governance could be two different things. This insight might assist him, he decided. There was one thing he really didn’t have to worry about: he was outside the influence of any lobby group jockeying for position and advantage.

  Besides, many of the new colonists were getting on with their new lives and had begun to enjoy the benefits of living on Skid.

  He jotted down a few more words. Egalitarianism, equality, freedom of expression. Then he caught a glimpse on one of the feeds of a new stray materializing out of a wormhole terminus close to his old home on Skid.

  “I wonder where he’s come from?” It was a silly question. There was only one place he could have come from now the direct link to Earth had been disconnected. Unless... Bruce watched to see if any more people tumbled out of the wormhole, but nobody else did.

  This guy had to have come from the settlements on Mars or the moon, the last group to be uploaded.

  What’s going on here? he asked.