Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series

by J. Joseph Wright

  She pirouetted to the next crypt, and then the next, on and on, prancing and singing a happy tune, presumably from her day, the early two thousands. Each time she came to a new grave, a new projector took over, displaying her three-dimensional form perfectly. She sprinted to the next hallway like a kid. From there, she ran out of his sight. Suddenly worried, he gave chase.

  “Lea!” he cried. “Don’t go too far! Your programming might get corrupted!” he stopped at the intersecting corridor. It had to be at least a hundred meters long. No way could she have traveled the entire length that fast. “Lea!” his voice carried forever. No answer. Only the steady humming of the atmospheric controls. She could have been lost, or deleted by accident. Discovering her missing, his worst fears were confirmed.

  “Boo!” he jumped out of his skin at her sudden exclamation. Spinning, he found her standing behind him, flushed with hysterics. “Scared ya’ didn’t I?”

  “Lea, you need to get back to your own…grave,” he shook his head. “It’s not safe for you to be doing this.”

  “But why?” she twirled gracefully, then again and again. “I’m having so much fun!”

  “I’m worried about you. I’m not sure the system was built to handle this type of thing, and I’m afraid your data…that you might be damaged. It’s just not safe.”

  “It’s perfectly safe, Harvey,” she swirled her arms like she was testing the water. “Aren’t you happy? Isn’t this great? Now I can go anywhere there’s a holoprojector,” she squinted like her mind was working. “Let me try something,” she closed her eyes and her hologram faded to nothing. He felt a lump in his throat, worried his theory had borne out. She’d gone too far, and now she was lost in the computer, her data scattered into the matrix. Then her voice, off in a distant part of the mausoleum, lifted his hopes and had him running, searching.

  “Harvey! In here! I’m in here!”

  “Where’s here!” he ran past the last of the vaults, past her grave, and into the map room, built to accommodate a healthy group of visitors. He was surprised to find, for the first time, someone else beside him occupying the large space.

  “Isn’t this wonderful, Harvey?” she stood in front of the giant interactive diagram of the mausoleum. “Now I can go with you, instead of being stuck all alone at my grave. We can be together, always.”

  8.

  Step…step…step…step...

  The treadmill wore a hole into his brain. The numbing repetition. The stupefying endlessness. Even with the assortment of virtual overlays to choose from, an Italian countryside, a coastal mountain chain, a dense rainforest—the whole experience made him want to put a laser Beretta in his mouth and pull the trigger. However, exercise being mandatory, he pushed through. That didn’t mean he had to be happy about it.

  “You work out a lot,” Lea said. She’d been watching him silently. Like every section of the base, the gym had a holoprojector, and she found it easy to follow him.

  “You took the words right out of my mouth,” he chuckled.

  “It’s good that you take care of yourself,” she sounded serious. “You need to stay healthy. I’d hate anything to happen to you.”

  Her image dissolved, just for a flicker, when she strode to the porthole and stared out to Zone One, section A-1. The graves immediately surrounding the visitor station. Harvey, puffing to reach his fifth mile, wondered what Lea could have been thinking as she surveyed the expanse of headstones and obelisks and crosses and columbariums. Both Fomalhaut and Piscis Austrini had risen to a reddish hue, forming elongated double shadows in the harsh light.

  “It’s so lonely,” she said, almost too softly for him to hear. “And so cold.”

  “What is?” he asked.

  She faced him. “Death,” her eyes traveled outside again.

  “But, you’re not dead,” he waved his hand over the treadmill controls when it beeped, initiating the cool down sequence. “You’re alive. You’re…you’re here, with me, right now.”

  “I am dead. My name is Lea Hamm. I was born in two thousand and twelve, and I died in twenty forty-one, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine,” she turned her head his direction again. “Twenty-nine. So young. So much more life to live,” her focus journeyed to the floor. “So much life.”

  “That’s not really you,” he spoke without thinking. “That’s the person you were programmed to simulate.”

  “No,” she said flatly. “I’m Lea. And Lea’s dead.”

  She looked at him again, and it made him feel a chill in his bones. Hungry. Desperate. Isolated. For the longest time she just stood there, watching him. He wanted to say something, but she stopped him with the oddest look.

  “Oh my God!” she put up her palms. “Stay here!” her hologram disappeared, and returned in the hall, just outside the exercise room.

  “What?” he stepped off the treadmill and hurried to the exit. “What!”

  “Stay HERE!” she waved her arm and the airlock slid closed. He banged on the glass, but she only shook her head and peered intently down the main corridor. Then her hologram vanished again. He tried the airlock controls and found they’d been frozen. A spark of panic rose in his gut. He struggled to keep it from taking over. Everything’s okay. Just a little glitch. Still, a holomemorial with the ability to manipulate the airlocks and shut him out of the system—not good.

  After waiting five minutes, Harvey told himself to be patient. Lea would be back and let him out in no time. After ten minutes, he began taking apart the control panel. Overriding the system seemed his only alternative. Halfway into the job, Lea returned, harried and stammering for words.

  “Harvey, I thought I—”

  “Lea, what happened? Why did you lock me in here? How did you lock me in here?”

  “I-I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I sensed you were in danger, and my reflexes took over. I wanted to keep you safe, Harvey. That’s all I wanted to do,” she fell onto him, her ultrasonic tactile display brushing against him in a simulation of an embrace.

  “How did you do it?” he repeated. “How’d you gain access to the controls?”

  She sobbed louder in response.

  “You have to promise me you won’t do anything like that again, okay? No getting into the computer, all right?” he made her look at his serious eyes. “Promise?”

  “Promise,” she sniffled.

  9.

  The alarm woke him up from the nicest dream he’d had in weeks. He couldn’t remember exactly what it was, and hated when that happened. Must have had that dream of home again, although, really, when he thought about it in his unguarded moments, he knew there wasn’t much to go home to.

  Emerging into consciousness, he recognized the alarm wasn’t his usual midnight wakeup call. A message had stolen him from his slumber this time, and it demanded immediate attention.

  Disturbance of unknown origin in Zone 1, section A-1, row 111, plots 11387 through 11393. Investigate.

  “Disturbance?” he said to the computer. “What kind of disturbance?”

  Unknown. Investigate immediately.

  “Unknown? Bullshit. This whole place is bullshit. They won’t spend a dime on the proper sensors, giving me this ‘unknown’ shit.”

  He cursed all the way to the changing room. His least favorite thing on the planet, his spacesuit, waited for him there. He didn’t want to put it on. Even though the bulky, heavy getup had heating and cooling, it still wasn’t enough. When the suns were out, he cooked like a lobster. And when the suns weren’t out, his fingers and toes felt like they’d turn into icicles.

  Most of all, he didn’t want to go out there. Into the cemetery. Not with a disturbance of unknown origin looming over his head.

  He found a helmet and suit, and had them on in record time. Just wanted to get this thing over with, goddammit. He had better things to do, like fix the stupid printer so he could get some decent chocolate ice cream. He climbed on one of the ground transports, a glorified golf cart with the suspension—and the ride—
of a tank. When he rolled close enough, the utility bay door lifted open, and a fiery red, purple, and orange double starset blinded him. He flipped down the helmet’s solar visor and saw fine after that. The coordinates and data for the burial plot in question flashed on the cart’s control screen. He thought about Lea as he gave the voice command to engage the autodrive. He wanted to tell her, but she was nowhere to be found.

  10.

  He spotted the trouble a kilometer before he got there. The oncoming dusk cast the landscape of entombed souls in high contrast between dark and light. Nevertheless, he saw it—a gravedigger, sitting where it wasn’t supposed to be, its mechanized boom bent like a rotted tree.

  “What are you doing out here?” he mumbled. “Gravediggers haven’t been used in a hundred years.”

  He disengaged the autodrive when his cart got close to the heavy machine, its large scoop raised, half full of dirt. He puzzled over that, and motored around the bulky thing to get a view of the damage. When he got to the other side, he puzzled even more at what he saw. Somehow, all on its own, the gravedigger had risen from its mothballed death, wandered into the cemetery, and, at random, chose a grave and dug a perfect 2,200mm long by 800mm wide by 2,400mm deep hole.

  “At least it still works,” he admired the machine’s achievement sarcastically, then parked and stepped out of the cart. His cynicism turned to distress when he spotted something on the ground, just next to the pit, stained and splintered. He knew what it was. As he got closer, he willed it away, wished it just a vision, a smudge inside his visor. The nearer he got, though, the more his suspicions were confirmed. A bone, a femur to be more accurate. A human femur.

  He rushed to the side of the gaping crater, a precisely squared vertical stamp. The headstone, a black granite slab, read “Myron Woods,” and indicated he died in Twenty-Three Fifteen. His family had paid a tidy sum to have him buried here, and trusted the cemetery owners to keep him safe from harm so he could rest for eternity. Now that rest had been disturbed, the promise broken. And DeepSix would hold him responsible.

  At the bottom, shrouded in twilight, he saw the coffin, or the last remaining vestiges of one. Its lid, jagged and broken, angled on its side, looked like it had been pried open by a set of giant jaws. Must have been the digger, he glanced at the machine’s rugged bucket, several thick metal teeth grinning at him like the cat who’d eaten the canary.

  He set his helmet lamps on high and pointed them into the grave again, hoping there were no more extraneous body parts to clean up. Nothing. No bones. No signs of a skeleton. Great, he exhaled his frustration, contemplating the large dirt pile next to the pit, and how much fun it would be to sift through all that for the rest of poor old Myron.

  First thing’s first, though. Find out why this happened.

  He climbed into the digger’s cockpit and searched its onboard computer. The ancient controls made it difficult to find the automatic settings, and once he did, he detected nothing out of the ordinary. The operational logs showed no commands, no programming, no reason whatsoever for the machine to start up and locate a grave and dig, all on its own.

  His attention wandered to the leg bone protruding from the loamy topsoil, and again his uneasy thoughts went back to his impending and disagreeable task. He opened the hatch, ready to climb out.

  “Suck it up, Harv,” he summoned his own pep-talk. “This is what you signed up for, buddy.”

  He put his foot on the sidestep, and the digger’s onboard computer lit up with a crackling flash. His first instinct told him this might have been the malfunction, happening right before his eyes. Digital artifacts on the monitor, static coming in through his headset. Numeric readouts and graphic displays flickered into an indistinct image, ringed by a soft, radiant aura. He saw eyes. They gripped onto him, tugged at him.

  “Harvey!” Lea’s voice commanded him into immobility. He hung on the side of the gravedigger and, stupefied, stared at her on the control screen. “Harvey, watch out!”

  Before he reacted, the stout machine whirred into motion, its near silent electric motor kicking on, its burly metal tracks jerking into a spin. The gravedigger rolled forward and the giant pneumatic arm powering the scoop turned and brushed him off like a bug. He hit the ground harder than he thought he would. Looking up from the silt, he understood why. The open grave. He’d fallen in.

  He got to his hands and knees, then fell to his chest again, promptly and forcefully, sand and grit pouring on top of him, what felt like a ton of it on his back. His headlamps dimmed to nothing, buried in soil, leaving him in total blackness. The silent, dead calm of the grave sent his heart into overdrive, his survival instincts into full alert. The stillness wouldn’t last long.

  Thrashing and scuffling and screaming. His suit sensors picked it all up, magnifying it in his ears as a strange and desperate situation unfolded on ground level.

  “No! You won’t do it! I won’t let you!” he heard Lea clearly in the otherwise garbled, terrified scuffle. She sounded more forceful than ever, a complete system overload. And she was in control of the gravedigger. It rumbled and rolled, tracks creaking with age, dust and soil kicking into the pit. Harvey tried to stand, but more fill washed over him. His suit barked at him, warning of an exhaust problem and a rupture in the leg. Batteries were low, and so was the oxygen level. His stay inside that grave would either be short, or it would be very, very long.

  Another load of dirt, rocky and dense, crushed him down even further. His helmet cracked, and he felt his biopack crumple. Up above, Lea’s frantic cries seemed to die off, in conjunction with a low rumble, fading quickly, from a steady and violent quake, to a subtle quiver, to nothing.

  Slowly, arduously, he managed to wriggle free from his tomb. It took everything he had, and his suit’s power was at an all-time low when he flopped onto the ground, heart pounding, muscles screaming, fighting for air his biopack didn’t have. He reached into the soft terra and felt something solid in his glove. When he caught a good look, he cringed and tossed it away. A skull, cracked and half-crushed. Then he came across a ribcage, or half of one, attached to a crooked spinal column. He clenched his lips to keep down the surge of stomach contents that wanted to erupt into his mouth.

  He crawled on all fours, red lights and alarms inside his helmet, life systems critical. The slow creep worked, conserved just enough air to reach the cart, and when he did, he plugged into its O2 condenser.

  With the suit situation in control, he had the luxury of surveying the situation. The gravedigger was nowhere in sight. In each direction, desolate, lifeless hills staggered into the distance, saturated with crosses and slabs and statues and crypts, a thin layer of dust hanging low, creating a false fog and settling onto the lowlands like hundreds of elongated, thin fingers. He shivered at the grim isolation, at the millions of dead, and at the thought that he’d nearly become one of them.

  11.

  Harvey crashed into another cart parked inside the utility bay, then tore off his helmet and threw it at the airlock control, which emitted a course buzz. The entrance to the visitor pod opened. He didn’t even take off his cherished suit, just unbuckled and let it dangle over his waste, though he did rip off his gloves one at a time.

  Marching to the mausoleum, down to the third floor, he reached Lea’s grave and ripped open the holomemorial control panel. When he did, the system started up. Lea appeared in hologram, standing next to him.

  “What are you doing, Harvey?” her wide, penetrating eyes looked on nervously.

  “I’m-I’m…” his words failed him. No sugarcoating it. “I have to shut you down, Lea,” he found it impossible to return her gaze. Machine or not, she’d become real to him, as real as any woman on earth.

  “Why, Harvey?” she reached in a vain attempt at stopping him. Strangest thing, though, and it happened once before. He knew her tactile display was composed purely of ultrasonic waves, yet her touch, it seemed…real. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  He fumbled for the processor
, and grasped the power fibers. “You’ve gotten out of control. You almost killed me—”

  “I saved your life, Harvey!” she yelled so loud, and with so much conviction, he was forced to surrender his full attention. He stared at her, but had to look away. Although he hated to admit it, Lea’s friendship represented the deepest, most fulfilling, relationship he’d ever had in his life. He’d forgotten she was a hologram long ago. And now he had to destroy her.

  “You tried to kill me, Lea,” he fixated on the power supply, on the optic fibers he needed to pull.

  “I didn’t try to kill you…I tried to save you!”