At the highest levels of government across the world there was some consternation a private consortium had somehow developed the technology to successfully land accommodation units on the moon which, before anyone really noticed, had teams of robots setting up the camp in preparation for the first human visitors on its surface in over forty years.
There was little they could do to influence an initiative which did not seem to have a defined leadership structure to contact. Attempts to insert spies and agents were gently rebuffed, and they failed to connect the revived MFY programme with the Skidians. The Transcendent had implemented a successful programme of deception designed to deflect interest from the program itself. Bruce wasn’t sure he wanted to know how the Transcendent had achieved this, but certainly they were left alone to get on with their project. However it managed it, officialdom seemed disinclined to act or take an interest in the activities of the MFY team in the Australian desert.
Besides many governments were distracted by endless numbers of refugees pressing against their borders.
Bruce played his part by largely staying visible on the farm, with the others rotating in and out on a regular basis, but he rather enjoyed flitting off to the complex and having an anonymous look around the place and joining in some of the training activities, though he had no intention of ever joining the various planned missions the MFYs imagined they were training for and the trip to Skid they were unaware of. It seemed to him the complex was encased in a protective bubble all of its own.
Which it is, the Transcendent remarked when he asked. We have built devices that interfere with the memories of anyone who comes close or has anything to do with the complex. We have also infiltrated every wireless network in the world. It means we can control or influence the thoughts and impressions of anyone who might try to hinder us, whether they be in or around the complex or on the other side of the world. We are hiding in full view.
Which was a pretty scary thought for Bruce, and one he felt guilty about – having been a party to bringing it to his home planet – until the Transcendent jogged his memory.
Surely I don’t need to remind you our own government is actively involved in programmes collecting data on all users connected to your digital networks. Besides, whether they know it or not, a number of your large, multinational corporations are only a few steps away from being able to develop this capability themselves. Given our observations, they would not hesitate to use these techniques for their own gain, so we feel justified in our actions in the cause of pursuing a desirable outcome for the greater good. For Skid, for us, and for humanity, the Transcendent concluded rather smugly – it bought into the lifeboat concept Shelly was pursing when it suited it.
The statement and the way it was delivered just about floored Bruce. He had to go away and have a beer and a smoke to get his head around it all. The Transcendent sounded just like any human politician justifying a shonky, ideologically driven, doomed-to-failure agenda which they were trying to impose on an unwilling electorate. For the life of him, Bruce didn’t know whether it was a good thing or not, but there was an inevitability to the process he could not prevent happening now.
If you are really concerned maybe you should join us on Skid, the Transcendent suggested hopefully again, as if it believed Bruce was the key to the success of not only the uploading process, Project Ark, but also of the future success of the new diverse community.
All the while containers full of food and other expendables, accommodation units, rovers, workshops, science and medical labs, and even small self-contained hydroponic farms were blasted into space in quick succession in preparation for the one-way manned missions to the moon and the planned Mars shots. In a very short time the lunar settlements would be able to support and supply a manned Mars mission that would soon launch.
This was the official story. The truth was both the sites would become outposts in the solar system for Skid and be supplied and supported by Skid until such time as human missions from Earth could land on the moon and later Mars. By that stage the Transcendent thought technology and cultural development might mean the human race was deserving of some of the richer technologies the Skidians had on offer, and this would be the time to come out into the open. Otherwise they would simply upload the inhabitants to Skid.
There was a lot of water to go under the bridge for that to happen, Bruce thought, with one eye and half an ear on the latest bogeyman outrage being discussed on a television current affairs programme. There were enough of them – from Islamist militants slaughtering infidels, to American police shooting black men and people on motorbikes more or less indiscriminately, and various other options in between. Besides, the American presidential race and the rise and rise of the seemingly unelectable Ronald Chump seemed to be the topic gripping most international attention.
After the first flurry of news interest, the MFY campaign hardly rated a mention on the mainstream networks and then, when it was clear the asteroid was not going to impact the planet, mention of it anywhere was rather muted. As for President Mitchell and any talk of aliens, this had completely ceased, and Arnold Rumbold and his attack at the United Nations appeared to have slipped from the wide public consciousness. Bruce wasn’t sure how all this came to be, whether it was the work of the Transcendent or the attention span of the international media, or both, to divert attention away from anything connected to Skid and the activity in the South Australian desert.
Bruce reckoned rather cynically the Transcendents had stumbled onto how they could best contribute to human development going forward. They had demonstrated faster-than-light travel across the galaxy was possible and, as their level of technological development was not so far ahead of mankind’s, travel across the solar system would soon be a viable option – then, not too far down the track, faster-than-light travel which would allow mankind to start exploring further into space.
This was how human development had advanced without any apparent catalyst. It was the realisation many things were possible even if the technology was not immediately available to realise the advances, once people were exposed to new experiences and technologies from an external source.
Unfortunately, in the past, as they unwittingly assisted mankind’s technological development, the Transcendents had also provided a form of proof that higher beings with a greater purpose existed, and helped to reinforce the teachings of fledgling religious movements, which would have a huge impact on the future of humanity to the current day.
Thirty-one
Most of the MFY applicants passed the initial selection process without a problem, the course –unlike something NASA might have put together – was not onerous in any way unless you were one of the lucky few who would find themselves on the moon or Mars.
The few real nutters, those who did not fit any sort of criteria that would have made them useful in one way or another, were weeded out and released back into the wider world as quickly as possible. While a few of these unfortunates took this as a personal affront, most of them were pleased just to have been given the opportunity and a shot at going into space, and this group remained staunch supporters of the MFY project. In this way the dreamers and frauds were excluded, leaving a surprising number of people remaining to go to the next stage.
Those who progressed to stage two were divided into two groups. One group, made up of people who did not possess the skills or aptitude to be assigned to the pioneer bases on the moon or Mars, had much to offer in many other ways and began to trickle through the wormhole system to Skid, uploaded to a new world quite different from the one they had expected to find when they had been accepted into the programme. Once they got over the initial shock of finding themselves on this new world and not the lunar or Martian outpost they expected, in the main they began to settle in to their new lives remarkably happily. Skid, with all it had to offer, was a much more pleasant place to live out your life than Mars or the moon, expeditions to which had been sold as one-way trips. So in the main, most
of the new colonists of Skid accepted this change with a sense of relief the hostility of the original Skidians, on finding they would soon be in a minority in their own land, failed to diminish.
The MFYers who were earmarked for moon or Mars missions began their training in earnest and when the time was right prepared for the rocket flights that would put them into space into ready-made settlements on the moon, then Mars.
The rockets were feints. They carried some cargo and the odd human passenger for form’s sake – there was no way the Transcendent was going to let a mere human pilot or crew one of those craft. Most of the people destined for these settlements and most of their equipment found themselves travelling through the wormhole now was refocused on the settlements, which was a wonder in itself.
Then one day the great complex in the South Australian desert was found to be empty; questions started to be asked as to where all the people had gone and how this operation could have been allowed to go on under the noses of the authorities, not least the servicemen and women in the military base just down the road.
The Transcendent had used a form of sophisticated mental sequestering process on the collective consciousness of the whole planet to mask the activities at the MFY site. Anyone who was connected to the wired world in one form or another – most people in this connected age – had been deceived.
But this still didn’t explain where everyone involved had gone.
The answer was obvious to most people, as the twinkling lights of the settlement on the moon could almost be seen with the naked eye on a clear night. These settlements seemed to grow at a hitherto unexpected rate, and then the process was repeated on Mars.
Simultaneously, almost as a distraction, the governments of southern Europe, Indonesia and Australia, who had been almost at their wits end trying to deal with the tens of thousands of refugees and would-be immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa swamping their shores, were confronted by a different challenge.
Passengers and crews of the vessels carrying them began to disappear, leaving the decrepit boats and ships to bob aimlessly in the swell, often still under power, until they were boarded by naval crews trying to work out where the passengers had disappeared to.
After a time, some crew members and a few passengers began to turn up in their home ports with fantastic tales to tell – tales of god and angels with supernatural powers and futuristic machines, that were largely dismissed as drug-induced delusions or hallucinations. Especially as most of these people seemed to be under the influence of some kind of psychedelic drug.
Despite their best efforts, the combined international intelligence community was at a loss to develop a rational explanation for the disappearance of the traffickers and their passengers, and why some had subsequently reappeared and others hadn’t.
Most of the survivors were the leaders of human trafficking rings preying on human misery and the heartstrings of the liberal left that forced governments to accept thousands of immigrants and the odd person on terrorist watch lists trying to sneak into the European democracies.
Bruce and the team had effectively killed off the people trafficking trade, temporarily at least. If nothing else, Bruce thought, this was a worthwhile effort. Especially given his squeamishness about the morality of the whole process.
Then it was all over, as much as any project of this size and complexity could be over, for Bruce. Luckily it seemed there was minimal collateral damage for Sue, Trevor Todd, the Tauroas and the Clark family – and his own.
The MFY candidates were settling into their new homes on Skid, the moon and Mars. Most of the teams watching Bruce on the farm eventually departed as worldwide attention focused on the dual mysteries of the empty MFY compound in South Australia, the missing refugees and the new lunar and Martian outposts who were not responding to any communication attempts. Nobody seemed to have linked Bruce or the Skidians to either puzzle.
Bruce felt the international powers slowly seeming to lose interest in him. He also supposed the formerly great world powers had realised that he was essentially impervious to influence or attack. Although he also detected the hand of the Transcendent and its hopefully benign neural sequestering in this process. However, he felt he was effectively confined to his farm and the small rural district he lived in, so it wasn’t as though he could cause any trouble for anyone. On this planet anyway.
Suddenly emulating the low-budget organisation placing people on the moon and Mars where huge, government-funded organisations had failed was the next big thing. There was going to be a scramble to physically claim territories the major powers had carved out for themselves on the planets like a bunch of eighteenth-century colonial powers. But they had to get up there quickly otherwise someone else would claim all the best bits.
Trever Todd, Sue and Wisneski had chosen to go to Skid. Shelly and Dick Todd had decided to stay on Earth, for now at least. Shelly had somehow gained a lot of leverage in the United States space programme and had taken Dick along with her as an adviser of some kind. Bruce suspected they, as much as the Transcendent, were responsible for him being left to his own devices.
Having access to a supercomputer, the likes of which had never been seen on Earth, was a fantastic bit of leverage for Dick and Shelly. But perhaps their best weapon lay in the fact that Ronald Chump had been an unlikely winner of the recent United States presidential election, and they knew far too much about him for him to have too much of a chance to pursue his own warped agenda and be dangerous.
In actual fact, far too many clever people knew far more about Chump than he could ever have imagined, and their focus was not assisting him in his Falstaffian, almost fascist agenda. These people were focused much further afield, on investigating the settlements on the moon and Mars and following the Transcendents deep into space, now they knew it was possible to do so. This was the future for the human race.
This was the line Dick and Shelly followed, but who knew how it would all work out for them once they got caught up in the meat grinder of US politics. They might have their own connection with the Transcendent but that would count for nought once the Transcendent had, well, transcended. Bruce hoped they did not expect him to come charging over the horizon if they got into any strife.
Then the Transcendent announced it was departing the scene. Bruce still perceived the low-level white noise he assumed was the Transcendent leaving a communications channel open to it and its cohorts. As promised, it left him the spaceship just in case he wanted to travel the galaxy or for an escape route if he needed it, and a version of the MPU subroutine to support him. In reality the Transcendent had not been very transparent in terms of the real reason it had left Bruce the means to go anywhere in the known universe and come and go as he pleased. He was free to do as he pleased as long as – and it made a lot of noise about this – he made sure he visited Skid on a regular basis, along with the Martian and lunar outposts.
The Transcendent had seemed to be suggesting Bruce was still responsible for ensuring all these outposts evolved as they should, insinuating he was fully responsible for their governance instead of just being an interested party.
The Transcendent had a lot of last-minute details to work out before it properly transcended again, and was strangely elusive for some time. Bruce had an idea it had its eye on trying out a new fleshie human host, even just for a short time, and spending some time on Earth. He was suspicious about one of his young neighbours was acting very oddly to say the least. The normally very reserved young man had suddenly become extremely gregarious and was having a great time. He wouldn’t have put it past the Transcendent to have downloaded into him for a bit of fun.
Before it departed, the Transcendent had talked about a number of loose ends to deal with on Skid and still seemed to be hinting Bruce might want to be involved in some form of governance process on the planet and lead an embryonic people, at least in the short term, before handing over to Myfair as the natural figurehead.
The Transcend
ent seemed to forget the number of people who looked to Myfair as a hereditary leader would be a very small minority of the population, and making him the leader as of right was sure to cause a lot of internal strife and dissension. Bruce felt sure in the vacuum on this conveniently empty, but well-resourced world a number of new immigrants would be angling for power and control. The Transcendent had also ignored the fact Myfair and Leaf appeared content with their new life on Earth. Returning to Skid didn’t feature highly on their list of priorities.
Bruce reckoned Skid could do a lot worse than have Myfair as leader, the new population having a ready-made figurehead instead of the new immigrants being left to decide for themselves. Democracy was okay as far as it went, but the new population was likely to be as cooperative as a herd of cats. Better Myfair than the spectre of Sue trying to insinuate herself, and some form of democracy modelled on the American Constitution.
But this wasn’t going to be, at least for the moment.
It would be an interesting time over the next months and years on Skid as everyone got to know each other. For most of the new immigrants, finding themselves on Skid was not what they would have imagined – they would have been expecting to be pioneering on Mars or the moon or living off the welfare system of some European nation. Skid was more, or less, than this, depending on your particular mind-set. A world of possibilities. More so, in some respects, than the moon or Mars.
Bruce decided he would visit those settlements to see how they were going; in the space ship he could be there almost in the blink of an eye. Which then led him to thinking about his own long term future. He was no closer to working that out, now Skid had been repopulated and the threat of an asteroid slamming into Earth had been resolved.
What was he going to do with himself? He had been at the big table when it came to making big decisions about world affairs, and anything less than that was not going to fulfil him intellectually. He was going to have to do some thinking about the future.
The Lifeboat Page 43
