Terradox Beyond

by Craig A. Falconer

  “That’s why it’s crucial for people to know what they’re signing up for,” he went on, “and that’s why all future Arkadians will be placed in this intensive six-month preparation program. You can call it quarantine if you want, but that won’t stop people from signing up. And while we’re talking about things like tax… you might have noticed the obvious point that very few extremely wealthy individuals have signed up. The reason for that is simple: their money will be no good on Arkadia. Those who have signed up are essentially jettisoning their wealth and are clearly in it for the right reasons. I’ll also say that although necessities will be provided, as they are on Terradox, our social planners have borne in mind that necessity is the mother of invention and that humans do need incentives to push themselves to the limits of their abilities. The Arkadian economy will be very different from the monetary economy we’re used to on Earth and we could spend five full shows talking about it, but one thing to remember is that we haven’t sat down with the goal of designing a model society which will never change. What we have sat down to design is a cooperative society which rewards hard work and is capable of sustaining itself with the help of technologies which eliminate almost all logistical challenges and menial work. That’s what we’re shooting for, and that’s what our citizens are going to get.”

  Robert had also been tasked with addressing some significant philosophical and ethical concerns which had been raised, primarily around the issue of children who would be born on Arkadia and ‘trapped’ there having had no say in the matter. Assisted by a team of media advisors, he countered with the valid point that children didn’t ask to be born anywhere and that life on Arkadia would be measurably more comfortable than life in many regions of Earth.

  Evolutionary questions also arose, not related to issues of eugenics but rather issues regarding life extension, genetic screening, parthenogenesis and even transhumanism. These questions were raised by supporters of the project behind closed doors, but the topic was deemed to be sufficiently covered by the already agreed-upon eighty-year restriction on non-medical genetic interventions.

  Chase had paid a degree of attention to these developments on Earth, but his primary focus on Earthly news had always related to the physical safety of the Ospanovs and other families who would ultimately be joining him on the new world. The news there was good, with a high-profile attempt on Peter Ospanov’s life having instantly brought the issue of weaponised anti-Arkadian sentiment to mainstream attention. In a matter of mere weeks, an international crackdown on violent agitators had increased feelings of safety in and around New London.

  Politicians who had spent recent months inciting violence through the propagation of abominable conspiracy theories saw their support bases dwindle as those with moderate reservations about Arkadia reacted to the uncomfortable realisation that Viola Ospanov, a hero to many, felt unsafe in her own home. This alone was enough to usher in a rapid shift in the level of disdain felt for self-serving agitators, and before long anti-Arkadian groups were relegated to the true political fringes once more.

  In a long and pleasant voice conversation conducted during the stage of the journey when the Earth-to-Karrier communications delay was at it shortest, Robert had assured Chase that 99.9% of those who weren’t going to Arkadia had never given two hoots about any political or technical discussions surrounding it.

  “I think at this point a lot of them just want us to get up there soon so they can watch everything unfold on Arkadia Live!” Robert joked, referencing the famous Terradox Live TV show which had turned Chase from a promising astronaut to a household name.

  Viola, at her father’s side for the duration of the video call, interjected to broadly agree with Robert’s point while taking slight issue with his tone. “Yeah, but that’s only because people have got lives to get on with,” she said. “It’s not like the ‘average person’ is too stupid to think about this stuff… it’s more like the total opposite: they’re smart enough to get on with their lives instead of obsessing about the details of a life they’re never going to live. And there’s nothing wrong with that. If we hadn’t made it onto that Karrier and ended up crashing into Terradox — you know, if no one knew who I was — I’d be one of those average people tuning in at the end of my average day.”

  It had now been several hours since Chase last spoke to anyone on Earth, and the data on his Karrier’s primary screen confirmed that Arkadia was growing tantalisingly close. The thinking time provided by such a long and lonely journey had given him a chance, belatedly, to mentally process the sheer scale of both the project he was spearheading and of the new world he was about to encounter. These macro considerations had been somewhat drowned in a sea of minutia over the past seven years, lost among the heated decisions over highly specific issues of one kind or another.

  The welcome imminence of the Karrier’s arrival at its destination had also recently brought Rachel Berry, Chase’s only co-passenger, to the seat by his side. The two got along well but hadn’t grown particularly close in their two weeks alone together, with Rachel having been busy handling all of the high-level administrative tasks that had made her presence so crucial.

  Her flight training, which had been completed fairly recently, was strongly encouraged by Holly since it enabled Rachel’s peerless expertise in craft management to be utilised in small-crew missions where basic competence in core disciplines was crucial. Chase had similarly studied engineering and particularly craft repair and maintenance over the last few years, making this two-person crew close to optimal. The addition of Nisha would have made it that much better in Chase’s eyes, while a communications prodigy like Bradley Reinhart and a rover expert like Bo Harrington could have filled out a five-person crew had the option been available. He sometimes liked to consider pie-in-the-sky missions alongside those friends and two more who could round out his dream-team: security supremo Peter Ospanov and of course the ultimate all-rounder in the shape of his better half, Viola.

  As the current bare-bones dream team of two sat side-by-side in a Karrier drawing ever closer to humanity’s new frontier, Chase couldn’t help but wish that many more people were there to experience it. In another sense, however, the lack of such numbers was what would make the imminent moment so special — only two people would pass through Arkadia’s cloak and see the new world before anyone else, and Chase Jackson was one of them.

  Although Rachel was fully flight trained and had earned her pilot certification without too many difficulties, she didn’t have anything like the experience Chase had amassed over the past seven years. Unlike his, her confidence wasn’t boosted by having flown through deliberately hellish conditions on Terradox for fun, and she was particularly unsettled by the imminent prospect of flying into an invisibility cloak and trusting that it would let their Karrier through.

  Cloak-crossing was nothing new to Chase and he knew that the environment he would come across on the other side was extremely tame in comparison to some areas of Terradox — a point confirmed by the live readings of many on-the-ground instruments already stationed on Arkadia — and he repeatedly made these points in an effort to soothe Rachel’s mind.

  Both knew there would be nothing to worry about on the ground since there were indeed sensors everywhere, all of which had been communicating with both Earth and Terradox for months and confirming that all was well.

  The cameras on the inside of the atmosphere-retaining cloak had meanwhile been delivering high quality footage of every inch of Arkadia’s surface, and although Chase and Rachel hadn’t been privy to this footage they knew everything had gone to plan. Their primary task was not therefore to touch down and check everything was okay, but was rather to be seen touching down and also to deliver some highly specialised cargo.

  Chase positively knew that everything was going to be fine — his faith ensured that he truly knew it — but he got the strong impression that Rachel didn’t share this confidence.

  “This is one of those moments…” he sai
d, turning away from the apparent expanse of space to glance at Rachel. “Once it’s been, you’ll wish you had it back. Don’t waste it worrying about bad things that aren’t going to happen, just try to swallow your fear and enjoy it.”

  Rachel closed her eyes and breathed deeply, then nodded intently as she opened them.

  Chase looked briefly at a countdown timer on his control console and returned his gaze to Rachel almost immediately. He held his right hand out towards her, inviting her to take it. “Eleven seconds,” he said.

  Rachel turned back towards the front-facing window but grabbed Chase’s hand without hesitation.

  “Damn, your grip is up there with Grav’s!” Chase laughed, exaggerating more than a little but still feeling the effects of his post-graduation shake-off even two weeks after the fact.

  Rachel was too intently focused on the false emptiness of space up ahead to even hear these words. All being well, Arkadia would appear as if from nowhere in a matter of seconds, and it was as though all of her senses but sight shut down to maximise her eyes’ acuity.

  For his part, Chase wasn’t just acting relaxed; he truly did have no doubt that everything would go perfectly to plan. The best minds humanity had to offer had worked on every part of this project, and people had been flying through cloaks for over a decade with no major incidents.

  He saw this cloak as new rather than untested, a distinction he used when convincing Nisha that he would be okay, and he certainly felt calmer than he had during Hell Runs on Terradox when his lightweight Wasp had to navigate harsh conditions and cross invisibility cloaks that changed position each time and required absolute alertness.

  “Four,” he said, casually glancing at the timer.

  “Three,” Rachel replied, slightly more than a second later but apparently calm enough to hear him this time.

  “Two,” they announced together.

  A second later, Rachel’s was the only voice to complete the word ‘one’.

  Their slightly mistimed count ensured that the timer hit zero before the word was out, and Chase’s well-honed and instinctive visual reactivity had caused his hands to drop Rachel’s hand and grab hold of the manual controls as soon as the Karrier was through the cloak.

  He very quickly sat back in his chair as the widest smile of his life danced across his face and the most incredible thing he’d ever seen grew ever larger and ever closer.

  “We made it!” Rachel yelled, jumping to her feet in unadulterated joy.

  Chase sat speechless, gazing in awe at the immensely vast and picturesque plains of Arkadia. “And we made that,” he eventually said, feeling a pride in humanity that far exceeded any he’d thought possible. “Rachel… we made that. Look at it! It looks like paradise.”

  “And this is the empty part,” Rachel beamed. “Wait until we see the rest…”

  thirteen

  The Arkadian atmosphere was calm, allowing for an effortless landing in the shadow of an imposing building identified by familiar signage as Arkadia Central Station.

  This building, evidently inspired by its Terradox-based counterpart, would only welcome arrivals on a few occasions over the next year or so as essential workers and then the general population arrived in batches prior to the romosphere’s final departure from high-Earth orbit.

  After that, the plan was for an interior refit to repurpose the building as Arkadia Central Hall, the future house of Arkadian governance in years, decades, and indeed centuries to come.

  As soon as the gentle landing was complete, Rachel rushed to a window and gazed out in awe.

  “We’re actually here,” she said, mainly to herself.

  Chase fiddled with a few buttons on the control console before joining her briefly at the window. He had initiated the final stage of atmospheric testing, a largely redundant procedure which would check that readings from the Karrier’s own external sensors agreed with those already received from the thousands of sensors built in to Arkadia’s landscape.

  “I’m going to load up the Explorer,” he said. “Can you keep an eye on these readings and call me if anything doesn’t look right?”

  “Sure thing,” Rachel replied, sitting back down and attentively watching the screen as the first data began to flow in. “It’s all looking good so far.”

  Keen to get outside, Chase set off quickly down the corridor and wasted absolutely no time in gathering everything he needed. His first port of the call was the live cargo bay, which housed most of the boxes he had to load into his TE-900, the large multi-terrain touring vehicle he would be using to cover a vast distance in the hours to come. TE stood for Terradox Explorer, as he knew very well, but today the vehicle’s horizons would be broader than ever.

  Chase’s visit, while considered a crucial symbolic moment for the Arkadia project, was also of great pragmatic importance; his arrival marked the first of many which would bring precision equipment and other resources to the romosphere. Some of the items to be delivered, such as the live cargo Chase was about to load onto the TE-900, quite simply couldn’t have been fabricated via any existing romotech-based methods. Others, however, like a ground-based telescope Rachel was set to install, were inanimate objects and items whose construction could theoretically have been coded into the embryonic romosphere which expanded into the vast world of Arkadia.

  Due to the two-year expansion time and three-year gap between the initial launch and the planned mass arrival of Arkadia’s inhabitants, it had been wisely decided to refrain from hardcoding too many specifics into the romosphere’s final layout. Because so many decisions relating to Arkadia’s founding society were made during the romosphere’s expansion — indeed, some were still to be made and would continue to be debated for months to come — it made a great deal of sense to concentrate on the big picture and leave some of the details until later.

  For this reason, many buildings were currently empty but for the most basic fittings. Much of what was still needed could and would be fabricated in Arkadia’s own expansive Romotech Production Zones, which weren’t strictly zones in the sense that term was used on Terradox but which would fulfil a similar function on a far grander scale.

  Any live cargo naturally had to be sourced from either Earth or Terradox, and Chase’s current horde of bio-crates were the first of many such deliveries. Although he didn’t know the precise details of what were eggs, what were larvae, or what other terms might have applied, Chase knew that the largest of the boxes he moved to the TE-900 contained whatever was necessary for insects and fish to emerge in a short time.

  He did know how much care and attention had gone into preparing the so-called bug boxes in particular, and he had been tasked with placing and unpacking them at specific co-ordinates during his day-long mission.

  The only animals present on the Karrier that were alive in a form recognisable to Chase were a dozen or so canaries. These birds had been in the main area rather than locked away in the dark and controlled conditions of the live cargo bays, and he had grown to like them during the journey. Although he’d been unsure of them at first he now knew he would miss their company on the way home, once he’d placed them in pre-built enclosures complete with an algae-based feeding system.

  Well, if algae’s good enough for us… he thought with a wry grin.

  His final cargo, in deep freeze, was a huge crate containing a vast collection of viable genetic samples of other animals. These were destined for Arkadia’s biomedical centre, or BMC for short, a large campus-like development consisting of distinct sectors which would serve as everything from a primary care hospital to a centre for cutting-edge biological research and reproductive management.

  The Karrier’s cargo-moving equipment made Chase’s loading quick and easy, and before long the cargo bays were empty. As far as he understood, future deliveries would coincide with the arrival of core staff members in Ferrier-class vessels, many times larger than this Karrier, and the live cargo bays of those Ferriers would see a lot of future use.

&nb
sp; Rather than from Terradox, other animals would be brought to Arkadia from Earth at a later date. He knew for sure that things like poison arrow frogs and tardigrades, both of which were being studied extensively on Terradox, were dead certs to make the trip.

  Dozens and likely hundreds of other species would make the trip to Arkadia, with the most controversy so far having arisen when it was confirmed that chimpanzees would be among them. This wasn’t for invasive medical research and certainly nothing along the lines of vivisection, Dimitar Rusev and other key Rusentra figures had stressed to temper a brief public outcry, but rather for very limited and humane toxicology-related and atmospheric testing processes. The confirmed presence of rodents, some of whom would be used in essential and humane medical research, generated predictably less public interest.

  Chase had no strong opinion on that front, knowing that the staff at the BMC cared for their animals and that the kind of testing that would occur was a world away from the kind people were worried about. His only hesitation regarding the animals who would share his new world had always focused on the potential of any large carnivores being brought for behavioural research. Thankfully common sense won out in arguments that had occurred on this point far above his decision-making level, with Holly having personally assured him that she wouldn’t let anyone “pack any crates full of lions and tigers and stick them behind romotech fences that could fail and let them out.”