Terradox Beyond

by Craig A. Falconer

  With the last of the boxes loaded, Chase stepped into the TE-900 to check that it would start up. I really should have done this ten minutes ago… he thought, momentarily doubting the vehicle’s perfect status readings. It started up without any problem, sending a wave of relief through his body as he headed back to Rachel.

  “All okay?” he asked as he approached.

  “Green all the way,” she replied, rising to her feet. “You know what comes next…”

  Chase’s eyes lit up all over again, like they had when he first passed the cloak and caught sight of Arkadia. “You know, I really wouldn’t mind if you want to go first. I know you’ve done a lot of work on the sensors and on making sure everything would be okay in the cargo bays. We wouldn’t have to tell anyone that you were first to step out.”

  “There are cameras everywhere, Chase,” she chuckled. “Thanks, really, but even before we release the drones, the cloak-cams will pick us up and send everything back to Terradox. And our orders couldn’t really have been any clearer: you go first. After all, you are Chase Jackson.”

  “So everyone keeps telling me,” he laughed, stepping towards the corridor that would lead him to the Karrier’s hatch. “But hey, you can’t say I didn’t offer…”

  “And don’t pretend the air is choking you,” Rachel said, patting Chase on the back as he inched ever-nearer to becoming the first person to set foot on Arkadia. She remained in the safety of the Karrier, as planned, to monitor his unsuited descent from its ramp to the Arkadian surface.

  For his part, Chase was too keen to explore the new world to waste time with any jokes — even ones that he would normally have enjoyed. His innate keenness to explore was so great that the intermediary step of touching the surface of a world he already knew to be safe struck him as something to get out of the way, rather than an adventure in itself. He even wanted to carry Rachel’s toolbox with him, to minimise the number of trips they’d need to carry everything she needed to assemble a telescope on the roof of Arkadia Central Station, but she reminded him that Holly and everyone else wanted some nice clean footage of him touching down with a smile on his face and nothing in his hands.

  It wasn’t that Chase didn’t appreciate how lucky he was to have been chosen for this mission — he did, and had made that clear to Holly and the rest of the selection committee — he was just positively itching to get up in the air in his TE-900 and see everything that his future home had to offer.

  If Arkadia was a rock, Chase Jackson had long wanted nothing more than to turn it over and see what was underneath.

  Once through the exit, he strode confidently down the Karrier’s ramp. He turned and waved to Rachel at the front window, then paused for several seconds. “Well, here goes…” he said, trying to introduce some tension without laying it on too thick. He spoke again as he stepped onto the dry surface: “This is for everyone who made it happen.”

  He looked down at his feet then continued walking until he was in the centre of the small gap between the Karrier behind him and the huge building in front. He outstretched his arms and spun in slow circles, looking at the sky as he went.

  “Time to get down to business,” he said after several rotations. He saw that Rachel was already gone from the window, getting ready to make the short walk through the building to reach its roof, and he hurried back inside the Karrier to help her with the equipment.

  Rachel accepted his offer of going out first this time, and led the way with her tool box. Chase wheeled out a much larger container which held the telescope itself and followed right behind.

  The building’s automatic door opened when Rachel approached and a vast array of high lights flickered to life when she entered.

  “Power’s working,” she said, happily stating the obvious.

  “Looks that way,” Chase replied, laughing without slowing down.

  Even if huge lettering hadn’t identified the building as such, both would have immediately recognised it as an exact replica of Terradox Central Station, just with far less furnishings and far fewer informational screens.

  The elevator worked without any hitches and delivered them to the roof in no time. Chase took the opportunity to glance out at the expanse of undeveloped land.

  “Do you know what it feels like?” he asked, leaning into a safety railing as he gazed back to see Rachel busily unpacking tools and components. “It feels like we built a safari lodge and forgot to order the animals.”

  “I don’t think you order the animals,” she replied without looking up, amusement in her voice. “Don’t you just build a lodge where there are already animals?”

  “That would also be an option,” he chuckled, walking around to look out in another direction. There, to the back of the building, he saw a series of lines marked on the ground. The large spaces between them were effectively parking spaces where Ferriers would be kept, fully stocked and ready to be used as emergency life boats in the hugely unlikely event of an emergency.

  After a minute or so of looking out and thinking about the possibilities, Chase checked that Rachel had everything she’d need and told her that he had to get going. “I have a long list of places where I have to drop stuff off,” he reminded her, as though it was necessary. “Starting with the BMC for all of the deep-frozen samples.”

  “Say goodbye to the birds for me, okay?” she said.

  “Goodbye for now,” Chase replied. “The canaries are going to nice areas and they’ll have all the food and water they could want. You’ll definitely see them again when you come back.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Rachel smiled, looking up from an imposing-looking series of installation instructions.

  “Cool. So how long is that thing going to take you to fix up?”

  “Two hours, maybe three. I’ll be done before you’re finished with your drop-offs. You’ll easily be longer than that, right?”

  Chase nodded enthusiastically, a broad grin filling his face. “Don’t wait up.”

  fourteen

  Having flown back and forth over almost every inch of the colony in the past seven years, Chase Jackson knew Terradox like the back of his hand.

  Arkadia, however, was an unexplored wonderland.

  After he took off towards the Biomedical Centre, the first thing that struck Chase was the seemingly unending flatness of the landscape. Compared to Terradox, with its rocky peaks and uneven terrain, the sight before him was so flat that it didn’t look real.

  For as far as he could see, the landscape looked decidedly plain. Everything felt the same too, with no changes of conditions like he was used to at home. Indeed, in stark contrast to Terradox, Arkadia had no zonal grid whatsoever. A small number of areas would instead be zoned-off from the general environment as necessary, using microsphere-like barriers, wherever atmospheric changes were needed for specific purposes or where potentially contaminative materials would be used or stored.

  This is Terradox without restrictions, Chase thought as he raced towards the horizon. This is Terradox if Holly and the planners had been able to build the colony from scratch instead of having to do their best to work around what Morrison gave them. This time we’ll be able to fabricate whatever size and shape of ‘zonal’ divisions we want…

  His next thought was that the vast plains below would be perfect for herds of buffalo or wildebeest, continuing on the safari lodge theme that first crossed his mind on the roof of Arkadia Central Station. I need to suggest that to someone, he thought, slightly more serious about the idea now that he saw just how much space there truly was.

  Several more minutes passed with similar thoughts circling, until the Biomedical Centre finally came into view up ahead. By the time Chase reached it and prepared to land, a much more expansive development was just visible towards the horizon. Having been desperate to reach the BMC until now, Chase suddenly had a new target in mind.

  He was self-aware enough to laugh at these fleeting thoughts as he landed the TE-900 gently at the BMC’s main entrance
. The somehow campus-like layout of the concentric development was very eye-catching, from the ground as well as the air, and the glass-heavy design of the buildings did justice to the scale of the project.

  A huge amount of research would be conducted in these buildings, as had been the case in the primary research laboratories housed in the high-rise research units of Terradox’s Gardev Heights.

  There were no automatic doors here, as Chase had been warned, but his wristband allowed access exactly as it should have. He ventured inside the primary care hospital to take a look around, leaving his cargo in the vehicle for now. Although the furnishings proved just as limited as inside Arkadia Central Station, which surprised him slightly, he felt very much like the air was pregnant with progress.

  His exploration of the hospital was anything but eerie, unlike the stories he had heard of Holly and Viola’s initial discovery of the unoccupied development in Terradox’s best-forgotten New Eden zone. Indeed, rather than one of foreboding, the only sense Chase got was one of the boundless possibilities Arkadia offered.

  The sight of a fully stocked room and its ready-to-fill frozen storage units focused Chase’s mind and reminded him that he was here to do a very specific job. With that in mind, and with his initial curiosity sated, he fetched the relevant cargo from his vehicle and began to unpack it. Taking tremendous care to follow every instruction to the letter, this was no quick task.

  A short break was required when the task was complete, and Chase took the opportunity to check in on how Rachel was doing with her own task. She was more than halfway done, he learned, but Chase couldn’t have been happier to have a lot more work ahead of him.

  If Arkadia was a full-sized swimming pool, a bird’s eye view confirmed that the construction planners had barely dipped their toes in the water. Even the extensive areas which had been earmarked for imminent development and were currently being discussed on Terradox amounted to nothing more than a tiny sliver of the shallow end — it really did take being there to understand just how big Arkadia was.

  Chase’s next stop, where he was to place the first group of canaries in their waiting cage, took him straight over Arkadia’s main residential development: Starview Springs.

  The vast space he crossed before reaching the city-like development’s sprawling streets reaffirmed that the planners had consciously left massive areas undeveloped, presumably to allow for whatever kind of societal expansions were later deemed necessary or desirable.

  With a relatively small founding population and plans in place to expand outwards in good time, Starview Springs was surrounded by empty space.

  The best view yet greeted Chase when he flew over the pastel houses below, although he couldn’t shake the notion that the picturesque unoccupied homes looked like they were part of a nuclear test site of centuries gone by, waiting for a bomb to be dropped.

  More positively, thanks to these views it belatedly struck him that one thing citizens and planners on Arkadia would never have to worry about was distributing power, a task which had been done seamlessly but anything but effortlessly on Terradox.

  Here, there was no need for a single underground cable or unsightly pylon. Here, Arkadia’s cloak efficiently stored power generated both via solar capture and within the reactor at the core of the enormous romosphere. All buildings and large vehicles were designed with what Chase understood as a kind of thin romobot ’coating’ on their roofs, which enabled them to draw power from the cloak’s immense bank as and when required.

  The general layout of the community evoked thoughts of Terradox’s Sunshine Springs, the obvious inspiration, albeit the bigger and better Starview Springs contained significantly larger houses with significantly larger spaces between them. Many had swimming pools, but not all. Some likewise had roof terraces with views of the plains — even more reason to bring in those giant herbivores, Chase thought — but all were spacious and beautifully designed. He imagined that these differences were likely in place to reward productive research or other useful contributions, with these kinds of perks relatively straightforward to offer. And with even the base level of accommodation being so luxurious, he doubted there would be too much resentment over such differences.

  Planning decisions on things like this were rarely easy, and Chase didn’t envy those involved in making them.

  Aware that his movements were being tracked and recorded, that he was working to a tight schedule, and most importantly that there were plenty of other things for him to see, Chase didn’t land in the residential area.

  Things changed greatly after a few more stops as Chase passed over a genuinely colossal domed structure that must have been twenty times the size of Little Venus. He gazed down in awe as it went on and on and on, like an optical illusion begging his mind to doubt his eyes. It crossed his mind that this might have been a physical structure with a self-contained atmosphere of its own, perhaps designed as a shelter of sorts should there ever be a minor issue with Arkadia’s wider artificial atmosphere.

  The next empty canary cage lay in the Shipyard area, an RPZ-like development designed specifically for the construction of spacecraft, probes and future embryonic romospheres. This was where Rachel would spend a lot of her working days when everything was up and running.

  As Arkadia’s population grew over time, Chase knew that Ferrier-class spacecraft would be fabricated at the Shipyard as and when required to meet potential demand. Ferriers which delivered the initial founding population would park in the spots he’d already seen behind Arkadia Central Station, but greater life-boat capacity would naturally be needed when the population expanded.

  Prior to that would come the launching of a probe to the asteroid Nisha had mentioned off-the-record prior to his departure, and then the so-called minisphere which would hold a strategic position halfway between Earth and Arkadia. The Shipyard had an exciting future ahead of it — perhaps more so than any other area of the new world — and its layout more than lived up to Chase’s hopes.

  There were several large buildings, each of which had a multitude of subterranean levels providing views of the enormous ‘hole’ they all surrounded where huge projects would be developed.

  Chase said goodbye for now to the latest group of canaries he placed in a cage near the Shipyard, and was unsurprised though admittedly disappointed that his wristband didn’t unlock any of the nearby buildings’ entrances.

  Back in the TE-900, he checked his list and saw that his next stop, and his last, were relatively nearby. He initially opted to drive to prolong his adventure but took off after only a few minutes; with an arrival at the Arkadia Sands beach area within easy reach, there was only so much nothing he could endure.

  Over the years, and even before he met them, Chase had heard the stories of the original Terradox exploration. One point which always held the public’s interest was the moment when Holly and Grav, Harringtons in tow, had stumbled upon the beach that later became known as Terradox Sands.

  And even though Chase knew both where he was and what he was about to find, neither of which could have been said of Holly’s group twelve years earlier, nothing could have prepared him for the postcard-perfect view that emerged after fifteen minutes at full speed.

  Chase didn’t fly directly over the beach and instead followed his instructions to land well before it and drive under a tunnel-like entrance which took him either through or under the first mountains he’d seen on Arkadia so far, which existed in apparent homage to those which similarly surrounded Terradox Sands.

  A vast sea came into view before the sand, and Chase didn’t have any vivid mental images to relate to the clarity of the tropical-blue water, let alone any adjectives to describe it. His jaw was slack with wonder as he parked at the edge of the access tunnel, ready to unload his only water-bound cargo in the appropriate spot.

  He removed his shoes and socks to feel the heat of the sand and the relaxing lapping of the impressive tide. It astounded him when he stopped to think about how all of this
was possible, and he couldn’t even imagine what Holly must have been thinking when she stumbled upon something similar after crash-landing on Terradox while travelling between the supposedly empty space between Earth and Venus.

  Besides the tide and the utterly incomprehensible volume of water, the shape of the beach also impressed Chase. For although it had looked circular from above, on the ground it felt like he was standing on a long, straight stretch of sand. In an effort to buy himself some guilt-free leisure time, he promptly dealt with his huge cargo container, unsure exactly what kind of microbes or whatever else he’d been asked to dump but proud and not a little relieved to have done it.

  Strolling along the golden sand, Chase concluded that the beach really was straight. It was also very long, taking him a good while to cover on foot. He reached a cove and headed back, where he was eventually unsurprised to find an exact replica at the other end.

  It’s like an octagon, or something, he realised. Way more than eight sides, but that kind of idea.

  He was correct on both counts: the beach, entirely surrounded by mountains, was indeed divided into straight sections — and way more than eight of them. The number was in fact forty, and a large island in the middle, teeming with palm trees, ensured that no one could see the beach opposite to the one they were on. The coves likewise blocked off adjacent beaches, meaning that all anyone could see from the ground was the sand, the ‘sea’, and the beautiful island in the middle.

  Only when Chase left the beach and took off again a full thirty minutes later did he get a direct bird’s eye view of Arkadia Sands. It looked incredible from the sky — truly immaculate, like concept art for the perfect holiday destination — and this view added a new layer of appreciation to the genius of the design. He was glad he had seen it from the intended perspective first, and began to think that Holly had probably instructed him to drive through the tunnel rather than fly in precisely for that reason; so that his first view of the beach would be the right one.