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Amid the bustle and commotion in the…

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Command decks stately ready room, a very startled Jaz was huddled by a bulkhead staring blankly out into the inky black depths of endless space. As commanders with their cadres of junior officers rushed about the room, pulled out sheets of paper, maps and rushing to monitors to account for this point of conjecture or that. Raised voices and shouting permeates the massive room. With sixty people plus their retinue of advisors, councillors and experts the room was a shambles of order and coherence. Arguments bursting here and there, with academics butting heads regarding every single data point imaginable. It was heaven for those inclined to be pedantic, and hell for everyone else. The slow moving bureaucratic creep of something completely unexpected.

For Jaz and Jorec it had been seventy two hours of hostile interrogation and questioning, and unabashed harassment from the security divisions, senior science officers and almost the entire rank and file aboard the UB313 research outpost. Jorec wasn’t in much better shape for being slightly more senior than Jaz. Seems that in their vigor to get a jump out of archiving the old tight beam network they had maneuvered themselves, by leaps and bounds no less, over top of the appropriate chain of command with the news of a far off human distress signal. The Admiral, captain and station CO were not impressed to say the least. Both of the recent science grads had been separated and grilled harshly on the finest details and minutia of their seemingly tall tale. But after blood tests, psychological evaluations, additional strenuous back ground checks, extreme vetting of their lineage and current health records the command team had no choice but to review the details of this once in a lifetime dispatch from the brink of the void. A call from some where out passed the boundaries of the known universe. It was pretty tense for all involved. The security team had not only withheld food, water and sleep in an attempt to coax out even one millimeter of difference in their statements, but pulled out each science graduates catheter and colostomy bag. Rendering them dependent on an actual physically working toilet which the security forces guarded fiercely. The inquisition team had a plan of repeatedly attacking their recollections of time stamps, and the order to the series of events. Was this a direct quote, was that paraphrased, how do you know if you remembered seeing it, did the other person tell you to say this, to say that, did either of you attach a contraband device to initiate the call. Do you have friends working with you on this, are you a terrorist, an insurgent, do you realize the enormity of what you are saying here today? Would you testify to this in a court of law, will you sign away your life on the strength of not only your recollections but that of your colleague. That sort of thing. Extraordinary – high intensity, with no rest, no bathroom breaks except under direct personal supervision. Which in the case of Jorec meant a security escort would have to hold his member in order to allow him to evacuate his bladder into a sealed and then later tested container. They even pulled their biometrics out to monitor the internal body receptors at specific time stamps to make sure each aspect of their subconscious bodily responses were genuine. In the case of Jorec, he suffered many – very real hours, of government mandated torture. He was currently wrapped in a thermal blanket hiding his sudden lack of finger nails and all of his broken toes from the rest of the gathered group. His swollen visage dismissed by everyone in an orange or maroon coloured jumpsuit. His lowly cyan coveralls soaked in blood and vomit didn’t even register with this crowd. He just sat in a heap, rocking himself almost imperceptibly as he too stared out the view ports in the cavernous ready room. Watching Pluto, which was the only thing that could be seen with the human eye way out by the UB313 research outpost anyway.

Up until recently this branch of humanity had assumed they were the furthest humans from earth. During an early schism among the highest ranks of The Company one intrepid individual broke away from the monolithic business entity and struck out on his own and fled beyond the easy grasp of the populations of the earth and moon. This particular order of scientists had not been present during the Nano Tech boom, nor were they aware of the technological breakthroughs that came about decades after the For E’s engine debacle aboard Margot’s Fever or the mysterious disappearance of the oil refinery come research flag ship The Lark Song some five hundred years ago. In fact this faction of people was not privy to a great many important details surrounding humanity as a whole. Being fractious and isolationist meant that they were only as good as their echo chamber allowed them to be.

Back in the cacophany of the ready room the question at hand was what to do with the news of this distress call. If they’d managed to hear the call then surely The Company back on earth would have heard it too. Do we ignore it, or do we send a probe back to gather more intelligence? At no point did anyone seem to care that the message had travelled several billion light years one way and thus whomsoever set the distress call was likely long dead. This discussion revolved around the potential to discover new territory and to lay claim to new resources. But primarily they wanted to know if the call was a trap. An ambush lying in wait for them. The heated and tumultuous discussion carried on for months. In the mean time two new items were able to be seen by the naked eye from the ready rooms observation windows. Those were the flash frozen, and boiled bodies of a badly beaten Jaz and Jorec, recent graduates of the Torus Station science academy post graduate program being taught on UB313 with five hundred year old out of date knowledge.

PART TWO of : The Company A Call To The Void

The deep space exploration beacon floated…

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Around in the vast expanse of nothingness that made up the majority of the dark and empty cosmos. Its many rows of small green and blue and amber indicator lights blinking steadily in the near perfect darkness as the large autonomous bulk drifted aimlessly along its course. The beacon, a long lost science tool several centuries out of main stream use, was various shades of a drab grey with only a few pops of bright orange and yellow painted onto the many metal panels and facets of its exterior. Weathered and worn, battered by debris, ice and the increasingly less common collision. With four massive booms with the now defunct sun light catching solar panels reaching out from the central body, like the dead arms of a desiccated witch, with gnarled and withered fingers at the ends. Between those four gangly booms are four matching but tattered solar sails which haven’t billowed with the energy of light particles in quite some time. Hanging limp, like a lifeless flag with no energy with which to fill them. Those ghastly witches fingers were actually the clumps of gathered sensors and radar dishes and the tight beam radio antennas. The unmanned science beacon had been gathering vast stores of near worthless data for many many decades now. With the satellites battery drawing so few amps, and the solar panels gathering next to no power the beacon is nearing the end of its life cycle. That is until an unexpected blip of the dimmest and softest glow of light became visible in the near endless ocean of black. Ever so slowly the dim pinprick of light grew to that of a grain of sand, a pea, a fat blueberry, then a grape, and with the sudden increase in light the sails ballooned full and the solar panels tattered as they were began to pull in and store energy. The jump in size from a grape to a melon to a gigantic mass of flaming gas was extraordinary. Near instantaneous compared to the many lifetimes it had spent careening through the farthest reaches of space with nary a hint of anything besides radiation and microwaves. As the beacon gathered up momentum and incredible speed it sent off one last tight beam of interesting information before plunging deep into the gravity well of a massive new star, and melting away into its constituent molecules and then atoms. Not even a whiff of smoke to denote the centuries old satellites passing. The ignominy of it all.

“Oh… Jorec we have something substantial coming in via the old tight beam network. Doesn’t appear to be the same old shit as before. Want to give it a look over?” Says Jaz the junior science officer on duty. Jaz has been one of three people in charge of monitoring the science decks tight beam communications system. Now that it is several centuries out of date, with it having been decades since they had anything worth looking at, it was primed to be dealt with by fresh out of the academy science grads. Archiving data and doing maintenance on non essential programs and hardware. Perfect for busy work and the day care of green horns. The slightly senior science officer, named Jorec looked up from his interface where he was storing old data clusters on physical hard drives. “Oh really? Wow – huh. Would you look at that. Must have seen something way out there, the file size alone is insane compared to the last, what, four thousand nearly identical recorded info dumps. Strange eh? Usually the signal decays to the point of the data being a corrupted useless tranche of absolute garbage. But this one, this one looks to have managed to catch all of the working repeaters to get back here.” Typing in a few short commands on his hand held tablet Jorec looks deeper into the incoming stream of information. “Wow man, the lag on this is atrocious. Like billions of light years. How did this ever get to us in such good condition? I don’t know of any overriding command codes that would trigger all of our deep space repeaters to function at top notch quality. The power consumption alone would be astronomical. We’re talking enough juice to power three Torus stations for a thousand years a piece. Holy shit Jaz, this could get interesting. Might be our ticket out of here early!” Says Jorec standing up from his chair. Turning around in the cramped room, switching the scrolling text from his personal lab view screen to the large central monitor hanging from the wall in the claustrophobic room as the data really begins to stream passed their eyes in lines of green code on a black background. “Oh – fuck. Call the CO, call the Captain, call the Admiral… call every fucking one!” Shouts Jorec in a frenzy. His face flushed red, as the veins in his neck and forehead nearly jump out of his body. Intermingled among the lines of code from the farthest reaching sensor arrays is an SOS, of human origin. From an area of space that no human has ever been recorded going to, or being from before. Accompanied by a very weak biometric life sign. Life for Jorec and Jaz was about to turn upside down, with them planted up to their knees in feces, while they are in the wrong orientation.

PART ONE of The Company: A Call To The Void

“Calvin are you listening to me? We have a problem…

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That needs your undivided attention.” Drones the beaten up orange cube of an educational tutor bot named Ed. The tank like treads have begun to wear away very rapidly over the last six months, and the noise Ed makes while maneuvering on the ships metal grated floors is unpleasant in my ears. “I’m sorry, did you just call me Calvin, Ed?” I say, coming out of my revelry rather sluggishy. “No Kelvin, you must have misheard me while your attention was wandering. I was in the process of explaining to you the dire situation in which we now find ourselves.” Barks the science tutor bot. “Wait, wait. I thought we decided to sleep on the bad news then come back here today to gather up our stuff for the grand adventure! I was so excited last night I could hardly sleep. I was kinda hoping we’d find some tucked away corner of The Lark Song that still had living people in it. Silly dream to get swept up in, I know. But, the hope is still there. The dreams are so vivid Ed. I can touch, and taste and feel it. It’s really all I can think about Ed. So what say you? You in, for some gallivanting about today?” I say it with a dopey grin upon my face, with a thousand mile stare in my moist eyes. Sweat has started to dapple my brow. The daft hope of human companionship this far into my forced isolation is tearing me up inside. The sheen of sweat upon my brow glints in the brilliant phosphorescent lights. “I fear that we will have to put the adventure on hold, for now Calvert.” Says Ed in a monotone. We are sitting facing each other, at one of the science labs work benches, even though Ed’s built in sensor array could locate and analyze me from any angle within a fifty meter radius. His sitting and ‘looking’ at me is just an artifact of my personal preferences, stored up in his memory and doled back out to me by his learning algorithms. “You did it again, Kelvin, my name is Kelvin. What’s wrong with you Ed.” I say. “Kelvin, pay attention. I’m not calling you by the wrong name. I said we have some major issues to attend to before we go traipsing over the ship to find that massive blister at the for of the vessel. Can you focus. What is the matter with you Calvin?” the pitch of Ed’s voice has begun to rise. To think of it, Ed’s voice modulation has been all over the place recently. Some times instead of talking he just emits a high pitched whine that rings throughout my head for hours at a time. Hours at a time. Huh. Funny turn of phrase that. I used to crawl through the virtual darkness with only a helmet lamp on to direct me through my adventures between the vessels double hulls. Now that I am out in the open, there is just so much brilliant white light. I can see everything even through my eyelids. The deck lights have begun to emit a strong halo, and a stretched glare across my eyes. Oh lord, I can hear Ed nattering on at me again. Jesus it’s getting hot in here isn’t it. “What did you say Ed? Sorry, I’m just all over the place lately. Oh wow, would you look at that…” waving my hands in front of our faces, I can see a delayed staccato view of my hand as it passes by, as though a blinking strobe light were blasting in my eyes. I can feel the distinct sting of sweat pooling on the surface of my eye balls. Colours are beginning to run together as I feel like I might just drift off to sleep. “Kelvin, my sensors are showing you with a heightened temperature of forty one degrees Celsius. Perhaps you should lie down.” Ed pulls back from the spotless work table we are seated at, and comes around to my side. In the growing dimness of the ship, I try to swat him away. “Leaf me, Leaf me!” I shout, but only a garbled jumble echoes about the room. “Kelvin, I’m going to deliver you to sick bay, and then I have to get to the command deck and check on the status of a few things. I’m going to slave your wrist comm’s to my internal sensor bank so I can monitor you from afar. I’m going to have to leave you unattended for quite some time Kelvin, do you understand?” All around me is dimming into total darkness. I can hear the tank treads rolling over the floors in the halls, and the power lifts whirring under the burden of our weight. Sudden flashes of light, and waves of pain take me as I am jostled harshly. I come to rest in the cool embrace of the med pod quite some time later. I feel the nano bots streaming through my bloodstream, and it feels like I am awash in a thick cool liquid. Then silence. With a loud gust of air, all becomes still.

With tortured movements the orange cube continues to circle the vessel as a silent guard. Stopping in at the science labs, command decks and engineering to perform as many of the required tasks as it is able. To conserve power all life support throughout the ship has been disabled except for the portion of the sick bay where Kelvin sleeps motionless in isolation. His weakened body was put into a medically induced coma once his brain had started to swell. Even in a mostly empty ship a microbial vector had managed to lodge itself deep inside Kelvin. Seems our DIY approach to implanting the new fangled Nano tech left a gaping blind spot in which a bug managed to manifest itself. Having worked it’s way through his ventricular, respiratory, gastrointestinal systems it managed to find an even more dangerous purchase in the brain. Kelvin had been quietly fighting a vicious internal battle, while slowly depleting the sick bays med pod of vital medicines and resources. After a while the med pod had requested Kelvin be transferred out to palliative care where he could be fed a steady drip of whatever could keep him comfortable. But Ed came by every few days to kick on the over rides from various high ranking helping hands. But as the flesh was deteriorated from age and use that would not be an option for too much longer. Ed was the first EDU bot to have ever had all his ai infused programs enabled at once. He had managed to tailor his speech patterns and work schedule to Kelvin specifically. Though Ed was not sentient, he was functionally closer to being so than any other mechanical bot ever created. This left Ed with the knowledge of emptiness, but no ability to feel anything specific about it.

Once it started to take Ed four days to travel between engineering and the sick bay med pod he had to make a difficult choice. Either maintain Kelvin’s over rides or remain within crawling distance of his charging station where his malfunctioning battery could be juiced up, and do whatever operations he could still perform for the now badly failing ship. Having spent four and a half years with Kelvin, it would prove to be the hardest decision the beaten, and badly abused orange cube had ever been entrusted to make. Let the sole survivor of the GCR burst aboard The Lark Song die in the hands of a doubtful med pod algorithm while convalescing, or let the badly damaged research vessel continue to drift off course and succumb to a cascading series of malfunctions and errors. The warning klaxons had long ago burned themselves out. Warnings and blinking lights had all gone cold due to negligence. As the vessel struggles to stay together, a difficult choice remains to be made.

Sitting still in the pitch black sick bay med pod isolation room Ed’s last blinking light has transitioned from a vibrant green, to a bold amber, then to a violent red, and was in the last waning stages of a faintly visible brown. In the vast blackness of the room, a cold Ed has come to rest with his finger poised above the override button. Manually keeping the heavy red button depressed, so that the med pod could not eject the sleeping patient.

After the ship has passed beyond the realm of human explored space, floated through the cold, isolated depths of the cosmos. Inside a massive research vessel The Lark Song a lone, and sudden cough can be heard followed by a sharp and deep gasp for breath. The med pod springs to life, with its white lights sparking to life, to reveal Kelvin, emaciated, cold and twenty years older encased in a small isolation room with no jumpsuit, and no way to get out buried in the depths of a dying ship.

PART FOUR of The Company : Chronicles of Kelvin

“Congratulations Kelvin, you’ve failed in absolutely…

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Spectacular fashion”, chimes the uppity education bot sitting behind me in the science departments largest lab. The robust orange cube like unit was typically used to tutor grad students during their first rotations aboard a science vessel, but I had it dumb things down for me so that I could try to figure out what had happened to my ships crew. About a year ago while I was crawling between the inner and outer hull plates of this ship, all seven hundred members of the crew just up and died simultaneously. At some point during the fifty two hours I was under radio silence, something catastrophic happened. Something that was not readily apparent upon my return. I admit, I took to denial and burying my head in the sand for a while afterwards, but one evening while floating in the commissary with my eyes shut and a gale force wind was blowing in my face I had an epiphany. Now, I’m just a mid level technician. I do a bunch of general tasks associated with small engines, electrical and mill work. But my forte is that I don’t mind isolation, small confined spaces or hard laborious tasks. The ‘epiphany’, as such was that I needed to gain access to as many of the ships systems as I could using the integrated biological over rides. In a moment of clarity while gathering up the deceased, I decided that storing the dead crew in our largest airlock cargo hold might be useful. And after using the ai enhanced scrubbers and cleaners to drag the bodies to one such location, disrobe them and store the associated ID tags and key cards on the right wrists of each of the dead. I made a point of having officers, or as high up the chain of command for each department set aside at the head of each enormous pile of bodies. I had a plan. An unpleasant plan at that, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

It took quite some doing to gain entry to all of the other departments but a little bit of ingenuity and a whole lot of free time meant I could figure out how to do it. So with the help of a reciprocating saw and the right hands of every department head and their personal ID cards, I had a chance to figure out how everything turned to shit on me.

“Kelvin, I do not understand how you failed to account for so many variables when preparing the simulations and models. Your ineptitude should have disqualified you from serving on a science vessel.” Quips the EDU bot again, disrupting my deep thought. “Fuck you Ed. I’ve told you repeatedly, I’m not a part of the science team, I’m a mechanical technician, I maintain the ships closed systems between the double hulls. I’m more of a spelunker than anything else. And, by the way – fuck you.” I curse at the beaten up orange bot. It has been seated in front of me in the lab for the last three hours as I attempt to run simulations on what could kill several hundred people without leaving a mark on them. “Apologies Kelvin, I was built to tutor grad student level science majors, and their speech patterns and repeated turns of phrase are logged and reused according to my learning algorithms. I assure you, my ‘personality’ is purely unintentional.” The units lights blink and glow softly as if showing some kind of contrition. I think it’s more a case of me going slowly insane, rather than the EDU bot gaining sentience. “Well, thank you, I suppose. Do you know anything about what happened? Have any additional insights I can add to these simulations we’re running?” I ask it again, hoping for a better answer. “We both know that I am unable to do your homework and/or assignments for you Kelvin. That is cheating and outside my operational parameters.” With a hum and the whirl of internal fans, the EDU bot continues to sit still doing very little to help me figure things out. “Tell you what Ed, I’m going aft to grab a helping hand from one of the science officers, I’ll be back shortly and I’d just love it if you could put any new information we uncover into layman’s terms for me. Could you do that for me, huh?” Sitting across from one another at the lab table, ED visibly grows taller in response. “Oh, yes. That is something I can do. Shame you don’t know any of my hot button commands, we could do so much more if you knew them.” Chirps the bot, as it’s head and neck extends out of the cube base where the tank tracks are mounted. “Why are you telling me this now! We’ve been at this for months, with little to no new knowledge uncovered. Jesus. Maybe lead with that info next time!” Rising out of my chair, visibly angry, face going red, veins in my forehead and neck throbbing. “Apologies Kelvin, I assumed you knew. All EDU bots have an extensive list of hot button commands for analysis and a laundry list of practical science related tasks we are capable of performing.” Answers the bot quietly. “Ok well, riddle me this Ed. After I return from the aft airlock with a severed hand and appropriate ID card to over ride the login commands on the research decks work terminal, could you direct me to where I would find those commands. Like a document, book, binder or app located somewhere on this ship? Do you think you could do that for he, huh?” Looking at the bot from behind the desk, I walk out the door and head aft of the ship. From behind me I can hear Ed nearly shout in the affirmative.

Walking down the spotlessly clean halls with their brilliant white lights, it can be easy to imagine that on a vessel this size that you are merely out of view of others and not entirely alone. Thinking about the mysterious deaths of the crew has brought a new vigor to my daily life. Though morbid, it has allowed me to channel my efforts into something constructive. While I still fulfill my assigned duties, it seems as though without any additional wear and tear from a crew that I can go longer and longer between maintenance checks. I wired the duty logs to ping my wrist biometrics when something pops up. So now that I have down time I figured I’d try to have some answers ready when the mission ends in another two and a half years. Turning the corner at the last T junction on the ship I come face to face with a massive set of atmosphere rated titanium double doors. Looking at a hand written sign posted on the door I can find the helping hand I’m after without having to dally among the dead. Smell isn’t really an issue, neither is decay. I keep the airlock in vacuum ninety nine percent of the time. After I dehydrated the bodies, I used the coldness of space to flash freeze them all in place. Locating the senior science deck officer, I pressurize the airlock. With a loud clunk I can hear the air tanks pumping oxygen back into the cargo hold within. As the doors glide open, the dimness of the space within takes over. Near the front of the room is a small table with a reciprocating saw, a charging station, cloth bags and box of masks and goggles. Picking up the PPE and saw I wander down the aisles to find the appropriate body. Kneeling down beside her, I set about gathering up the helpful hand. Having done something similar to myself only a year or so ago, I feel a strange sort of kinship with the lifeless body. Picking up the hand I place it gently in the beige cloth bag and head back to my work station. Keeping everything orderly and in it’s place. With a soft goodbye I close the airlock doors and depressurize the cargo hold. With a soft hiss the air returns to the tanks and the rooms temperature drops to below freezing.

“Welcome back Kelvin. And who do we have here?” The bot crawls over to me at the lead science officers work station. I run her ID card through the input, and when the login prompt comes alive I place the severed right hand, with it’s manicured metallic flecked green nails on the biological scan pad. A brief pause, and then the screen jumps with streams of data, and unintelligible code. “Whoa, holy shit. Looks like we might be able to get some answers after all. So Ed, where do I go, and what do I need to do?” Standing beside the EDU bot at the terminal, a previously undisclosed view screen flips out of the bots belly, and a blue schematic and a list of directions appears. “You may take this tablet with you, go grab the command codes and the command key and we can go over the new directives step by step.” Looking down at the schematic i feel a sudden sense of dread and fear trickle down my spine. Oh fuck no, I do not want to go back there. Not now, not ever. Why did they have to keep the command keys down in the sanitation department. Stored right next door to the waste containment canisters and that mother fucking thresher unit. Yeah, the one that took my arm off at the fucking elbow. “God damn it.” I shout. Ed pulls back several paces. “Is there an issue Kelvin?” He nearly whispers the question to me, either that or my ears are ringing from shouting at the top of my lungs in the lab. I can’t even clearly recall just how it happened either. I know I was drinking, and thought I’d have an adventure down in the bowels of the ship. I came out of the service tunnels I had been exploring and entered into a cavernous room with these massive steel tanks, they extended upwards like sixty or seventy meters. The tops disappeared in the dimness of the rafters. I was looking up, and up and up at one of the largest canisters, and fell backwards into something sharp. And immediately knew I had fucked up. My jumpsuit got caught and these exposed gears pulled my arm into the mix and then jammed. I had to use a miniaturized saws all strapped to my harness to cut my arm free at the elbow. Screaming and shrieking along with the tool as it cut through bones, muscle and sinew. Then in a foul daze I crawled to the medical bay and holed up in one of the few pristine white medical pods with automated surgery technology. Carrying my own arm, or what was left of it with me in my teeth, after I somehow managed to pry it out of the gears. God, that was a waking nightmare. The thought of going back down there for this fucking key is really giving me cause to pause.

Sitting on my bunk staring blankly at the Jean-Luc Picard quote etched into the bulkhead over my doorway I breath in sharply, and exhale in a long slow whistle. Steeling myself for all of the feelings I fear might paralyze me as I venture down below decks to the sanitation department and the waste storage canisters. Dressed in my dirty red jumpsuit, I dress in my work gear. Adding my various harnesses, links, hooks and carabiners. No real need for them, but that crushing hug from the tight fitting gear makes me feel complete, and thus comfortable. Rising to stand, I kiss my finger tips and press the pads of my fingers to the roughly etched proverb. Hoping against hope that I will come back unscathed and still in one piece.

Walking the three kilometer stretch between my crew quarters and the sanitation decks below. I follow the winding path, that winds and rises and leads me along gangways, gantries, stair cases and finally a large service power lift. The tablet has been invaluable in getting me down below with the most straight forward route. After about thirty minutes I’m looking at the brown signage that denotes the sanitation sector. Looking around I am amazed at how spotlessly clean the waste reclamation processors are. You could eat off of every surface down here. Following the schematic I realize I am only ten meters from where I found calamity as a drunken fool. Still quite taken by the sheer size of everything down here. Across the hexagonal room, flanked by several waste containment canisters is the storage lock up. A beaten brown steel safe with no discernible locking mechanism. As I get within a meter of the unit the tablet chimes, a green light flashes suddenly, and the doors unlatch and pop open silently. I am met by a strong citrus scent, the stringent cleaning agents sting the inside of my nostrils. Inside hanging among some goggles, a couple of canvas aprons, rubber boots and several buckets of industrial cleaners is a sizable black and yellow hand held unit. It has the words BOTKEY stenciled in white spray painted on it. A matching icon on the tablet is rotating 360 degrees in an isometric view. Looking around, as though something or someone might burst out of a corner and toss me bodily into the thresher unit, I hesitantly grab a hold of the BOTKEY and gingerly close the doors. With an anticlimactic shrug, i turn back to the hallway to walk up to the science lab. Looking over my shoulder at the thresher unit as i pass, i can see a tiny streak of red down the front of a bent guard plate. With a laconic smirk i say aloud “Not today mother fucker.” And promptly slip on a tile transition and fall flat on my ass, bumping my tailbone in the process. “Ok, you got me! I’ll just get the fuck out of here now!” Punching the communicator at my wrist i call up Ed to let it know to meet me at the science officers terminal post haste.

“Thank you Kelvin, I am now able to interpret, analyze and utilize the data from the ships sensor arrays to answer your queries. What would you like to do first?” The timbre of Ed’s voice has dropped with the operational parameters being edited. The unit is standing taller than before, and several extra data screen and ports have materialized on the bots cubic chest cavity. Rubbing my sore tailbone I say “Ok, Ed. Well… if you could take a look over the sensor data and see if the cause for all of the crew deaths was either internal or external. That makes for a great start. Can you give me a sense of how much data you have to sift through?” Standing shoulder to shoulder with the EDU bot at the dimly lit terminal on the work station underneath massive video monitors. Ed is currently plugged in using a hard line direct into the ships data banks. With a deep boom Ed says “There is approximately six thousand teraflops of data from the external sensor arrays. It could take anywhere between seventy two weeks and three hundred weeks to find the pertinent data sub sets…” blurts the EDU bot unit. “Well… shit. What if you look at the data just before I logged the second crew death aboard this vessel?” I offer in rebuttal. “That would narrow things down quite considerably. Might I ask why only at the time of the second death logged?” “The first death aboard was my best friend Keith. The second death logged would be the first of the seven hundred crew that died all together. Thanks.” I say gruffly. Turning away to sniff back the worrisome threat of a tear. Not sure why I care so much about getting emotional around Ed the tutor bot. A brief pause, then “Kelvin, this ship experienced a catastrophic dose of GCR from a localized supernova. Traveling at a speed of C.99 the speed of light there was no warning possible and they all received many times the allowable Sieverts/Rems of cosmic radiation. How you managed to survive is beyond my ability to compute.” Ed disengages from the terminal and rolls back across the room to the well lit work tables. Standing there dumbfounded I follow behind him. Out of the dimness by the huge wall monitors showing massive streams of code and data, towards the low hanging spot lights, and the lighted table top surface. “Jesus. GCR huh? Damn. Microwaved their brains in a nanosecond. God damn.” A lone tear wells up and threatens to pull more out of my eye. Hanging on the surface of my eye like a ten tonne weight. With a snap of my fingers. “The bladder!, it was the water bladder. I had to contort myself to get around it, underneath it. Practically in it to fix a wiring issue under the bridge. I was hidden behind eighty thousand gallons of plain water. It protected me, by fluke. God damn.” With a beep and a blinking series of lights Ed does a few calculations and concurs with my hypothesis. Millions of miles from anywhere, the answer provides little comfort to me. “Hey Ed, I think I saw some psychiatric protocols in that menu that would allow us to chat without me having to ask any task related questions. You feel like a conversational upgrade or what?” With a series of blinks and beeps I have my answer.

PART TWO of The Company: The Chronicles of Kelvin

You know, I’ve been down into

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The deepest depths of the ocean on a year long solo mission, I’ve been left stranded on a rocky out cropping of an island somewhere in the south Pacific for what I later learned was nearly three years, and now I work hauling minerals and ore for The Company out in deep space on an immense refinery freighter. Do you know what these three things all have in common? Isolation, misery and a total lack of any kind of quality amenities. Put those locations together with a vivid and increasing sense of impending doom and you’ve got yourself a recipe for disaster. You know it’s kind of funny how we always assumed that our salvation would come in the form of a generational colony starship that could shuttle humanity off deep into the cosmos. But, as a species, humans we aren’t very well equipped to deal with the dread and despair associated with the isolation that accompanies deep space exploration, and trans generational travel. It takes a certain type of psychopathy to be able to deal with those particular stressors found during extreme cases of isolation. I for one, am just the right kind of crazy to pursue those types of careers where these issues are present. I’m as close to a recluse as you can get. Like a full on level ninety nine introvert. Nothing makes me happier than to spend time alone working on all sorts of shit. I also have little concern over tight spaces, like those found in the void between a star ships double hulls. To perform such pleasures required of me during regular maintenance I get to play BDSM dress up in various harnesses and tight fitting gear over top of my jumpsuit and poke around in these labyrinthine crawl spaces that criss cross these massive vessels in a lattice work of dead ends, bolt holes and conduits full of cabling and pipes. Deep, dark and for the most part endured in entire radio silence. The captain of my last vessel said that when his ship runs out of coolant they will ask me for a blood transfusion so that my life blood could keep the transport running ice cold. My nick name is Zero K, the K is for Kelvin. People who don’t like me much call me absolute zero, but eh, fuck them. I enjoy hard labour away from crowds of people. I’m the guy who volunteers for shite details so I can work off peak hours, and all alone. Or at least with minimal supervision. I have one friend. An angry, short & hirsute fella who doesn’t know how to speak in anything other than a yell, or monotone. We usually sit in silence and drink until one of us slinks off to bed without saying good bye or goodnight. A lot of guttural grunts and groans pass between us as a kind of idiosyncratic language. He’s great. Likes the same beer, works similar shifts doing the same work as I do. We have matching burns and scars. We’d have made an excellent couple if either of us were gay. Well, you know we would have if he hadn’t of gotten killed during an ammonia leak from a pierced pipe. What do you know, done in by a random sharp edge on our industrial strength PPE. You see, technically we’re considered to be inside the ship, even if we are actually between the inner and outer hull plates where all the majestic inner workings of the ship are contained. That means we don’t qualify for the over the head fully encased respirators with individual environmental controls. We just get an over the mouth and nose mask with change out pads for dust, debris and moderate airborne contaminants. He stood no chance against that leak. It blew aerosolized ammonia right over his face at point blank range. Hell, at 8 PPM, that shit kills, let alone a full jet stream dumped over the back of your head. After that I filed down every hook, link and carabiner on my tattered, dusty red jumpsuit. No point in repeating the sins of my only friend. Crawling in there after him and having to drag his cold lifeless body through the darkest reaches of the ship was not something I ever wish to do again. As it would happen, I would never have to. As all of them, the whole crew that is, all seven hundred of them just up and died while I was doing maintenance on the main bus panel wiring underneath the bridge several months ago. A fucking dick of a job too. The sort of job that requires about sixteen hours of crawling, bending and twisting to contort my body through the minimum sized access ports that are located around a massive water bladder just to get to the appropriate junction, then only needs forty minutes of upkeep performed on it. Like, what a piece of shit. Then you guessed it, another sixteen hours to extricate myself. All told – with food breaks, sleep and an abominable amount of crawling, that job was fifty two hours on. I went in and everything was hunky dory, I come out to a ghost ship with nothing but the dead bodies of the crew laying around. Mysteriously, with no known reason that was readily apparent. And just like that, I find myself in isolation again. For what it’s worth, our course through the stars was predetermined, and we will come home after our five year mission is completed. I have enough resources for seven hundred people over a five year term, so I shall not starve, nor will I be dehydrated. I just have to remain sane, and do my scheduled tasks, and pray. In the sage words of the twentieth century philosopher Jean-Luc Picard “You can do everything right and still lose. This is not a personal failing, but a fact of life.” I read that quote every day at the start and end of each shift. I have it etched into the bulkhead over my bunk in my crew quarters. Really makes you think – huh.

The loud hum of the air vent is echoing deep in my ears as I float, eyes closed, with the gale force breeze blowing into my face. The ship as a whole gets very quiet these days, and the loudness of the moving air makes me forget the ominous lack of activity aboard. I can almost imagine the sound of passing cars, birds or the far off indistinct muffle of an overhead conversation. When you spend years alone you learn to developed methods of finding inner peace and forgetting the banal repetition of your average day. My current trick is to crank up the lights, close my eyes tightly, and bury my face in the central air vent in the commissary. It moves the most air, and offers me enough room to just float in place while my imagination runs wild. Auditory hallucinations abound. Sometimes I can even feel the sensation of my communicator buzzing or hear an alarm sound. As I while away my time, face buried in the vent, the ship continues to perform the vast majority of it’s automated tasks. I keep to my work schedule, and eat the same things on the same decks as before. I know all too well the dangers of getting trapped somewhere strange by myself. That is not something I wish to repeat. I made a tough decision that weekend, and I still have the scars and emotional baggage associated with my extrication. Crawling three kilometers through the bowels of the ship to reattach my left arm at the elbow in the med-bay medical pods is not something I will likely ever forget. The trail of blood was gone by the time I felt well enough to leave that pristine white pod. The ai infused scrubbers had removed all trace of my nightmare. I kept the scar so that I know it really happened and I didn’t just dream it up. I do that a lot these days. I leave notes and etchings and drawings so that I remember having been there, and not run around the whole ship thinking I’m not actually here alone. When I am. Entirely alone. Isolated. With another three years and eight months left to go. In the cool cacophonous hum of the air vent I almost feel normal.

 

******

And for something different in these odd times, you can listen to me narrate this short story.

Interconnected short story space series.

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I finally got around to labeling each of the twenty sections of The Company series of short stories set in space. I hope this leads people to find and read the other parts, if they have enjoyed the first portion you come across. If I can figure out how, I will try to link them up on a page, or once I’ve made my edits I’ll post a pdf somewhere here for people to take if they enjoy the work.

Or, you know I could just list the “chapter” titles in order here later today, and that would aid people in navigating the archives to find them. I think besides putting it all into one document, this would actually be the most useful way to get it all seen, read and hopefully enjoyed.

I’ll keep you posted.

“Some jobs are hard no matter where you work…

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Like for instance take my job. I shovel stuff; rocks, dirt, faeces you name it. It’s hot and sweaty and not least of all it gets really dirty. Now I used to work landscaping back on earth, and I was a real model employee. Ten hours a day, inclement weather not withstanding, I’d be on a job site shoveling whatever my boss asked me too. Big heavy steel shovels, to tackle river rock, or top soil or straight up horse shit. I didn’t care. I’d turn up at seven am sharp, grab my trusty tool and fuck off down some massive hole and shovel. All gods be damned day long. I don’t love it, but it means I don’t have to talk to anyone, and I can listen to whatever I want while I work. I can move close to twenty five yards of regolith on an average day. Yeah, my hands and back don’t like me much. But it pays good. The boss man sends me cold drinks and a decent sandwich every couple of hours for my trouble. He doesn’t do that for everybody, just little old me.

So, as it turns out the union guys up on Torus station are taking on apprentices in the new year and my supervisor signed me up, unbeknownst to me. Well he captured some candid video of the big boss man singing my praises and attached it to my application. Turns out, boss man has a very powerful aunt in HR up on the Torus station. She snagged me out of a pile of fifteen thousand applicants. Now I’m headed to the moon, or some such to shovel shit for the sanitation union guys. I looked over the job offer, and holy shit does The Company pay out the nose for this sort of thing. Like a mother fucker. I’ll be swimming in cash or credits, slugs, dollars or ingots or whatever currency the station uses. I get private accommodations onboard the station too. Plus these brown coveralls, or a jumpsuit, or a body sock or some shit. I don’t know, I skimmed everything after the job description and the salary expectations. The packet that came in the mail also had a small leaflet regarding the orientation at the launch site, and that I’d have to undergo some psych evaluations, and run some safety simulations at an accredited testing location somewhere nearby here, in Arizona. I guess the big boss man likes me because I bitch while I work, and only to myself. With everything else it’s all yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. Smiles, a can do attitude and firm hand shakes all around. Get them while they’re hot! But I digress. Not much can be found regarding the orientation, just the location and a notice not to eat six hours prior. That’s kind of weird. I have an induction day scheduled several months from now, so in between shifts I have to go meet my company organized psychiatrist for screening tests and interviews. That’s going to suck the sweat off a hot horse’s balls. Also will have to log some hours in a zero g simulator. That could be interesting. Oh, the info packet says that the entertainment hub has grown from three decks to ten or more. I wonder what it’ll be like to cut a rug in space, but I’m day dreaming. “Hey, Stevo! – what’s with the shit eating grin? Here’s a sandwich, egg and cheese with mock bacon. You think you’ll have this pool floor flattened out by end of day today?” Says the big boss man. He’s over six foot six, and gotta be near to two hundred seventy pounds. He’s a looker, if you’re of that persuasion. I’m not, but you do you. I like tits, I’d do a lot of stupid shit for access to titties. Mm mm delicious. But the big boss man is named Roger Taylor, and his aunt is the illustrious Catherine Taylor, senior HR director aboard Torus station. She’s got quite the reputation, even down here on earth. “Yeah, yeah – no problem sir. I can have this all squared away for you by about six pm today.” He smiles down at me from up on the mound of dirt next to the newly excavated pool I’m standing ten feet down in. I’m of modest height, and weight. I’m not ugly, but I ain’t no looker neither, you know what I mean. I like to make music, and can shovel dirt like I was built by god to do so. The ladies aren’t so hot on the state of my hands, you know? calluses and manual labour and shit. I keep those finger nails clean and trimmed though, eh! Wink wink, nudge nudge. Coming from a lower class family as I do, I love to moonlight as a DJ, makes me feel loved, adored even. A real rush compared to digging ditches and working in enormous holes. I hope my less than stellar academic prowess won’t keep me from all that cool hard cash The Company has on offer. I’ve got five months to impress Ms. Taylor, and keep the big boss man happy so I don’t wind up homeless before that life boat ships out to space on Christmas Eve. Jesus, I hope they don’t want to go over my school transcripts, I passed by the skin of my teeth.

Those psych evals are super fucking strange, with word games and shit. Nosey bastards too, poking around in my personal life. Awful interested in my thirteen siblings, and my geriatric parents. No I don’t see them anymore. No I don’t care to “divulge” the reasons surrounding my departure from my family home. No I don’t care to refute any rumors of any sort. Fuck them and fuck you too. Hell, I told some of my best jokes and the lady never even chuckled. That doesn’t exactly bode well. Bitch.

Zero g simulations are the fucking shit! Man that stuff is fucking fun as hell. Bounce and float, use your arms to crawl. Being weightless is a real trip. Not a big fan of all the other folks puking their guts out though. Could do without that. Ha. Losers!

So the psychiatrist keeps asking me about how I feel about isolation, and “the void” or some shit. Who cares! Space mother fuckers! Like do I care about asphyxiation, or hard vacuum, or wearing a catheter, being alone for days on end. Can I handle being far below decks working with human waste. Why do I like shoveling so much. I do realize that I’ll have a much larger shovel and equal weight to move when in the sanitation department? Why manual labour jobs with no responsibility? Why no advancement in the eight years I worked for the big boss man? What are my coping mechanisms? Do I have any friends, a girlfriend, family connections of any sort. How will I cope with a vastly increased salary. So many god damned questions, my head hurts. I gotta go lay down.

So it looks as though I’ve been delayed, again. Not going to ship out for Christmas. The psychiatrist thinks I need more therapy or some shit. Turns out my humor tripped some red flags or they want more info on my background. God, don’t let this take my money! Oh, all that glorious money. I could afford to send most of my younger brothers and sisters to vocational school with all that dough. Get them out of that shit hole. There’s a reason I like to dig and shovel all alone in one hundred twenty degree heat. Pure heaven compared to my childhood. Ain’t nobody ever stubbed out a cigar on my balls when I’m running a fucking shovel in a pit.

I finally have a provisional offer to go up to work on the Torus. I just have to go through with induction and get my ass to the Torus station. That’s a cinch.

Well – fuck me. That was a process. They underplayed that spectacularly. I demanded they unstrap me from the gurney and I walked my ass that three kilometers to my coffin sized berth. You want to know why? Because fuck them, that’s why. Should have seen the medical technicians faces. That’s a look I’ll not soon forget. Lock that look into the ole spank bank for future reference.

“Welcome aboard the Torus station ladies and gentlemen.” Announces some HR flunky dressed head to toe in a bright yellow jumpsuit. A real Curious George looking goofball. The banana man and his troupe of minions is redirecting a sea of cyan blue jump suits, this way and that. Separating the students, from the security trainees, and apprentices from support staff. Finally after two hours in the massive receiving chamber, I’m the last one left floating against a bare wall. With a last glance the man in yellow looks through the room and pauses when he sees me. “Hello, can I help you? Mr…?” His soft lilting voice rising with the question. “Steve… erm… Stephen James Ortiz, sir. A new sanitation apprentice.” I say it quietly. No need to yell, he’s only inches from me at this point. “Oh. Well they know better than to bring you people in through the main gates. The service entrance is back down the hall, six flights down the stairwell, and where ever the fuck it is you guys conduct your business. Tell Terry that I don’t appreciate any browns up here on my flight deck. Fucking asshole. Shit shovellers in my reception hall. What the fuck. Wait until I tell everybody about this bullshit. Why you still here dickhead, go down into the bowels of the station with all the other half brained dipshits. Go on, fuck off then!” He makes as if you punch me. I stare at him, unmoved. Turning on my heel, I head for the stairwell located back down the hall. After a few minutes of float walking, gliding i come to a deep pit in the floor. A long deep dark corridor covered in netting that looks to go deep into the depths of the station. Taped one floor down is a simple note that says. “Normies stay away. Only the floaters are welcome here!” Nice – a shit joke, just what i was hoping for. What the hell have i done. As i head deeper down the shaft, a soft green light can be seen. As i pull myself, hand over hand towards the sixth floor of the sub basement i pull into a small anteroom with a round pressure door, equipped with a red circular wheel to open the seal. As it glides open soundlessly a flash of light temporarily blinds me. A loud whistle sounds, and I’m hit with the smell of astringent cleaners and sanitizer spray. The inner room is crowded with hundreds of brown uniformed workers and Curious George himself. “Surprise!” They shriek in well organized unison. Floating towards me banana man says. “Welcome aboard Stevo! Sorry for the harsh hazing, we play a trick on all newbies, we use you as a prop to maintain a certain level of distance between the upper deckers and us. Welcome to the best years of your life!” Turning to float beside me, facing the crowd, he takes my hand raising my arm like the champ in a boxing match. The group erupts into chants of Stevo! Stevo! Stevo! A grin begins to creep across my face. “Oh, you mother fuckers.” I half choke it out. Terry, the banana man, strips off his yellow costume to reveal his solid brown jumpsuit, and a union rep insignia on his chest. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you squared away and sorted out sharpish. You’ve got three days to acclimate, we’ll put you through our training programme, then you’ll be all set to do your designated service task. You’re going to be scraping down and shoveling shit in the huge containment tanks that are positioned under each sector. It’s lonely work, but it pays well. You’ll be trained on the respirator units we use, and will get your own magnetic levitating cart for tools and moving bagged waste materials between the enormous tanks and the recycler or incinerators. We have a party scheduled for tonight, as an ice breaker. I understand you moonlight as a DJ, if you’d care to share your music with us, we’d love to hear it!” Terry leads me to a gigantic lobby, with hallways leading off in every direction. “This is the dormitory, you can find your room by using your wrist communicator. It’ll key you into your rooms, and can dispense food from our commissary. You’ve got your own private bathroom, and you will get your actual uniform after the safety programme is completed. No exceptions, no exemptions!” With a quick hand shake, he leaves me to my own thoughts. The lobby is silent, well lit, with pristine gel couches arranged in a circle with a display in the center. There is so much room, I can’t believe my eyes. Tears well up on my face, and cluster on the bridge of my nose. I could get used to this.

Three bleary eyed days later my alarm buzzed at eleven pm. I had an hour to dress, eat and get over to sector two’s waste containment tank to meet my supervisor and start to learn the ropes. I was so anxious I ate on the trip, and good thing too, as sector two was a fair distance from the main dormitory I was lodged in. The huge Warren of tunnels, pipes, chambers, dials and vents was spotless, and repeated in a pattern every three hundred meters or so. Rounding a band I found Terry and a smaller woman, both dressed in brown standing beside a floating cart full of equipment. “Hey Stevo, glad to see you are as punctual as your references suggested. This is sector two’s smallest waste containment tank, and Jordie here will lead you through your hoops to get in and out alive, and accomplish your required tasks.” Terry was beaming, and cheerful. Hard not to be when everything is spotless and shining, and smells of lemons or berries. “I thought I had to undertake a safety programme or something?” I sputter. “Yeah, you do. But it’s on the job training here bud. You’re in the shit now, as it were. Ha! So listen close, don’t die, and Jordie will make a fully functional member of the team out of you in no time flat!” With that he left us alone, at the mouth of a huge airlock type chamber. The small red haired woman looked me over before she spoke. “They vet us types pretty good eh? Want people who don’t need to be babysat, and can do shit work with a grin on our face. Terry likes to find us underprivileged types and lift us out of poverty, if we’ve shown we got the goods. Out of the frying pan and into the potty. Ha!” The sudden burst of laughter seems to be a common affectation among Terry’s crew leaders. “So couple of tips. Always use your PE. It gets hot in there, but you worked in Arizona so the ninety five degrees won’t bother you much. Use the respirator at all times when in the airlock or inside the container. Never, ever remove it, the methane will gravely injure you. Not to mention the bacterial load inside these things. Yeesh. Wash your hands as often as you can. Your cart comes equipped with a fresh water recycler so you won’t run dry. We don’t shake hands much until out of our gear and showered. Elbow bumps if you must, but don’t touch anyone in uniform if you can help it. I’ll show you how to suit up, and in what order. I’ll test you on it as we go. I’ll leave a checklist you’ll want to memorize over time, but no harm if you use it forever more. I do. Any questions?” I nod that I’m ready to rock and roll.

After three hours, I’m left to scrape and shovel massive loads of shit. It’s hot, and this stuff gets heavy. But I’d much rather be here in a chemical toilet storage tank than back on earth that’s for damn sure. With sweat stinging my eyes, I use my magnetic boots to walk up the walls of the fifty meter tall tank, the fifteen meter diameter makes it seem like the most wide open space on the ship. I am amazed that this is a small tertiary tank. The big ones must be mental.

 

PART XXI

In the dead silence of my jumpsuit, the heavy rush of blood pumping…

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In my ears is deafening. The constant pounding of my pulse and rush of ragged breath inside my tight and claustrophobic helmet is awfully distracting. Strapped into the makeshift gel couch, I can feel my hands tremble in the zero gravity. I swear that my eyes are rolling in my head, and I’m so nauseous from the zero gravity vertigo. This is nothing like what we trained for. The deep pools we used back on earth just didn’t prepare me for how this would feel on the day. Every so often I switch between feeling as though I’m looking down on the ceiling from between my feet, to hanging there helplessly like a bat. Good thing our weapons are strapped to our legs via synthetic webbing. I’m so nervous I might twitch and pull the trigger if I had to hold it during transit. The trip so far hasn’t been too rough, the empty cargo container all sixteen of us are stuffed into is unpressurized, and without any form of life support, or entertainment. The only indication we have that time is passing, are the readouts on our wrists that monitor our oxygen use, and the build up of CO2 in the molecular scrubbers. The container is a dingy rusted orange, little more than a transport truck container from earth with a heavy duty tactical light welded in our field of view, affixed to the floor in front of our row of gel couches. Though it has been retro fit with explosive bolts to pop off the top and full front side. We’re all strapped into our make shift couches oriented towards the same wall. When the red light in the middle of the container goes out, the bolts will blow the container in two, and we unstrap and go to war.

The container we’re all strapped into is windowless, we are floating blindly. We are expecting to show up less than half a kilometer from Torus station, to be able to meet at our target. We’ve been given enough oxygen to make it through to our target, a few hours of a fire fight, then we’re on our own to make it to our evacuation points for extraction.  The rallying point is Margot’s Fever. Today, in front of the whole Sol system The Company will launch their new experimental star ship, and we’re about to fuck her up but good. Live on the evenings broadcast, for everyone to see. But we have to get to the coordinates first.

The inner system tug boats that we high-jacked are built to maneuver these cargo crates around with ease. For some reason, the depot where they were stationed wasn’t guarded at all. We staked our whole mission on gaining access to more than two dozen of them at once. Our knowledge of them is weak at best. The minds behind the operation didn’t share many details about them with us. That operational intel went to the drone operators alone. We can travel with them, we just have no control over them from inside the containers. An entirely separate compartmentalized team is running that show from the drone bay they stormed yesterday, down somewhere in Arizona. We have no idea if they still hold the controls, or if we’re being sent off to die unknowingly. We are counting on them to get us within range. We’ve been running this whole trip on our self contained environmental rigs and we have to complete our mission and get to the rendezvous point before we asphyxiate. Hard on the nerves, to say the least. Every so often I look down at the read outs on my wrist control units. Monitoring the oxygen levels and CO2 present in my rig. The whole trip is supposed to take us at least forty hours, and we have fifty two hours of oxygen. Things are tight, and we are all extremely tense. This is our first real mission out. Four fire teams made up of four people. We’re all vying for the same objectives in mind. Redundancies in case we catch heavy fire, or get caught out on our way in. We aren’t exactly tech savvy, but we’ve gathered enough C4, and other various explosives and weapons that we think we can absolutely total Margot’s Fever and make ourselves known in the system as people not to fuck with.

The static of the mic hisses. “Somethings fucky here guys, my oxygen tanks are reading only eight hours left.” Says a muffled voice, can’t tell if it’s from my fire team, or another group in a separate cargo container. “Well ride it out, then switch to your reserve when you get down below one hour, just don’t…” The words come tumbling out of my mouth without me realizing it. “Ok, I’ve switched over, What! – Now I only have three hours left, what the Fuck!” He starts to scream into his head set, the mechanical whine from the feedback is ear splitting. Trying to calmly talk over him I answer. “As I was about to finish, DON’T switch over until you are below one hour because the reserve tanks are greatly reduced in capacity.” I finish, slightly flustered. “You fucking asshole, you’ve fucked me. I’m going to die before we even reach the target. Holy fuck, switch it back, switch it back. Help me!” The panic in his voice is palpable. “That’s just it.” I say. “You can’t switch it back. All of our equipment is designed to be scuttled after use, no traces, remember. Surprise, attack, then vanish into thin air. That’s what the leaders trained us to do. Calm down, remember your training. Take small shallow breaths and you’ll just have to jettison your materiel for the mission to your fire team commander and bolt for the rendezvous point. Now stay off the fucking mics people. We need absolute radio silence.” without a hesitation I cut the feed from outside my own suit. I can’t be listening to someone have a panic attack mere hours before the greatest moment of my life. Listening to a fellow team mate slowly die while strapped to a gel couch will not do much for morale, and it’ll just put a damper on our mission.

Playing through my mind are all the ways this thing could go south on us, in a heartbeat. The tug boat drone pilots could get caught, and we get jettisoned towards the sun, to either starve to death or asphyxiate. They could be infiltrated and crash land us into the side of an asteroid or the station. Deliver us entirely strapped down directly to The Company security forces on the station. The bolts could fail to blow and we get caught stranded in our tin cans. They blow too hard and we get pulverized before we accomplish anything. The bolts could blow without enough force to remove the front and top plates, and they shift in space to crush us with their heavy mass, and inertia. Margot’s Fever could see us on their sensor array and melt us to slag with their thrusters. Our jury rigged suits and weapons could totally fail us and kill us all before we even get within a thousand miles of the station. A laundry list of terrible, horrible, awful things could happen. Which doesn’t include the all out fire fight we’re expecting to engage in as a show of separatist force. With no windows, and no way of knowing if everything has gone off the rails, we just have to lie in wait. Pray that we’re on the right path, and that our glorious sacrifices will be met with great gifts in our next lives.

In the vastness of space, a series of black containers race towards their targets tucked underneath the unmanned tug boat drones favoured by corporations other than The Company. The pressure and strain of the bobbing and weaving has the occupants deeply rattled. The pull of thrust has them pinned deep into the backs of their gel couches. The pressure upon their chests is so great they can hardly breath let alone talk. Their old jury rigged suits don’t have the pressurized seals that help to keep the blood up in their heads. Many have vomited inside their helmets. The near constant jostling has broken bones, and rattled skulls hard enough to afflict multiple concussions. The jumpsuits are a much older style, and not the tactical sort now in use by The Company security forces. They have been provided with no radiation shielding, and zero armor plating. This gaggle of separatist insurgents are deeply unaware of how they are being manipulated and are staged to be used as canon fodder. The deep rumble of the maneuvering thrusters causes their limbs to grow numb over time. The constant pinging of micro meteorites off of the containers starts to develop into a series of portholes where the action outside can be seen. Small pin holes become massive deep dents, which tear open to reveal the empty blackness of the void beyond. In several containers the torn open shell shards shear off to impale those unfortunate enough to be in the direct flight path of the pieces. Several insurgents are shredded by the barrage of space junk left floating out around the shipping lanes that surrounds the Torus Station. Barely visible at this distance is the Torus station itself, and the myriad service vehicles and exterior traffic that surrounds it. The tug boat drones are so much slower than The Company shuttles, that it’ll be close to a full day before they are within range of the station to blow their explosive safety bolts and release the hyped up, separatist martyrs inside. Not a single one of them will make it.

 

PART XX

“I heard you the first time…

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Why don’t you fuck off Lou, huh. I’ve got an important message here, direct from The Company that Ms. Taylor wants me to analyze. So just piss off, I don’t have time for your shit today.” Todd is livid, but their playful game of cat and mouse usually plays out with a more fanciful fanfare. The tall mountain of a man named Lou side steps the door to the now abandoned C Suites block, and Todd scurries along inside. Down the main thoroughfare, passed a massive row of desks and a palatial lobby, big enough you could host multiple robot fights in here simultaneously. Turning at a t junction, Todd locates the security details hidden terminal. Tucked back behind a generic looking cabinet, in a non descript portion of the office block. The beige angular box boots up at the touch of an analog key. It always strikes Todd as crazy, just how old the tech is that The Company’s security forces are utilising. Punching in a few key strokes, the prompts for the intranet come up on screen. Clicking a short message into his wrist comms Catherine suddenly appears face to face with him. The new holographic interface is really something of a marvel. “Great, now load in the whole message, do a search for any extraneous code, or tags, or what have you that might be embedded in the message itself. These are crafty buggers, must have a secret message in there to pass along covert data.” Her face is a mottled red and blue, slightly pixelated in the rendering in three dimensional space. “No, not much showing up here.” Says Todd. “Hey, wait a second. There’s a broken link to an image here. The corporate logo looks corrupted. I’ll scan that for….oh woah, here we go…” in the blink of an eye a wall of text begins to spool on screen. Directives, missives, commands and appendices. “Good catch Todd. Those tags look ominous.” She half chuckles. “Yeah – I’d say so. They have you flagged as a target. Jesus, they have you listed for Euthanization. Looks like a strike team located on the station has the green light to terminate your contract. As it were.” Looking down her nose Cathy says, “These people and their fucking euphemisms. Grow a pair will yah!” With a laugh she waves him off. “Ok log out, and get back to my offices. Take care to not be seen exiting the offices. Say hello to Lou, you saucy minx.” The display winks out. Moments later the lithe body of Todd is seen slipping into the shadows of the corridors directly outside the C Suites.

“I don’t understand you. How. Are. You. Still. Alive. Gods damn it! You should have been dead more than one hundred times over. I’ve stabbed you, burned you, given you viral loads of vast quantities, blood borne illnesses, hypothermia, hyperthermia. Are you a fucking demon!” Dr. Jang is pacing the laboratory, under the brilliant lights, in view of the camera rigs. His slow decent into absolute frustration with the near lifeless lump that is Ravindar Rashida is bringing him to his wits end. Soft steps can be heard in the halls. In comes the lead medical officer in charge of Project Cerebus on UB313. A man of medium height and build. Plain in look. Would be nearly impossible to pin point him from a line up. Nothing to distinguish him from countless other white men his age. “What seems to irk you so Dr. Jang?” He nearly croons the loaded question. For he is always watching on the far end of the lab’s CCTV link. “You’ve gone over, and over, and over this man. Do you have the answers we seek? We’re under – direct – pressure to produce results. I did not personally engage in subterfuge, fuelling a separatist movement and various terrorist plots, just to get stumped by physiology, and losing my grasp on a several trillion dollar contract with The Company.” The man’s sing song voice belies the true raw nature of his anger and loathing. His greed has led him to do some truly awful things for the sake of progress and an enormous payout that would take generations of poor choices to spend in its entirety.

“I have it on good authority that the dispatch from The Company is a trap. A time wasting trap. Now, as far as we can tell all members of the security forces have fled the station, so no one is here to read and carry out their directives.” Says Ms. Taylor to her gathered junior staffers. All of them trusted members of her inner circle. The vast majority of people may have left the Torus, but her staff stayed on. Todd coming through the doors, his nose in a binder – again. “What do you know about a guy named Dr. Douglas Jang, and an independently wealthy figure known only by the moniker Jones.” Crossing the room, over to her desk, he lays a print out on the work station before her. Looking it over, her thumb on her lip. “Well, if I recall, Dr. Jang was disgraced about twenty years ago, and banned from practicing. Had a penchant for unnecessary surgery. Seems he was a part of an older religious movement that shunned Nano technology. Was in such a state of denial, it was nearly pathological.” Leaning back in her chair. Stretching her back. “I have no idea whom this Jones character is. Financier? Patron? Alias? Hard to say. With a name that generic it could be nearly impossible to find him.” After a brief pause, the room stirs back to life.

 

PART XIX

“What an insufferable lot of twats these people are…

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Wouldn’t you agree Todd?” Quips Ms. Taylor the current senior director of HR to her deputy minister Todd Gaines. He has worked under her for years. Come to learn a number of handy tricks when it comes to dealing with the geriatric portion of the board of directors, joint chiefs of staff and now the security council. Todd was a part of the diplomatic endeavor that brought the warring factions of janitors and sanitation departments to heel. He was also a part of a top secret delegation that went deep underground to learn many of the stations deepest, darkest and most highly guarded secrets. Didn’t hurt that he fell in love with and married both twins that run the waste management services aboard Torus station. “Not sure how I should answer that ma’am. More than a few are on their last legs, and a good shouting match, or a tough row might keel them over.” He hasn’t looked up from his binder. It’s full of today’s agenda, with all sorts of interesting tidbits regarding the goings on of many groups aboard the station. “I’m getting pinged by several junior staffers ma’am so we best head in and confront this mess head on. Give’em a jolt, perhaps shake some positions loose on the board? Just a thought.” Finally looking up, he smirks at me. Yes, we certainly think on similar wave lengths. But it won’t suit my needs today to have any of these old farts drop dead mid conference from an aneurysm. “You go in first Todd, and I’ll be in shortly. I just have a quick call to make to shore up some possible gaps in our gathered intelligence.” Without missing a beat, Todd is through the double doors to the enormous luxury suites where the upper echelon conducts their business these days. Plush seats, expensive booze, cigars and the like. The air scrubbers here work desperately to clear the air, and the cool rush of recycled air makes the hard fabric on Catherine’s burgundy jumpsuit flutter. She has no calls to make, her arguments are airtight. Her case is going to ruffle some feathers. Make a few old men blush. Also, the chance to make them wait for her, and fluster themselves by realizing they no longer carry the balance of power aboard the Torus is just too good a chance to pass up. She can hear the rising voices, and the murmur turns to a din as she waits beyond the atmosphere rated conference room doors. Standing with her back to the wall, the subtle texture of the door frame glides under her fingers. Cool to the touch. Once she can clearly make out the shouting from inside she opens the door to stride in confidently, head held high. “Good afternoon ladies and gents. It is with great sadness today that I called you here. We have much to discuss.” Looking around the large room, the board members are seated, the underlings placed around them evenly, the joint chiefs seated on the far side, and the three chairs set aside for the security council are empty. With a puzzled look Catherine looks to Todd who shakes his head. “Well where the fuck are they?” She snaps. “Well, no matter. The security council is on the agenda today, so makes sense they would be absent to provide any further clarification with what I am about to say.” Walking down the length of the table, each member in turn swiveling in their seats to maintain visual on her. “I have convened this urgent meeting to discuss a most troubling matter. Seems the newly formed, and entirely secretive security council has been up to no good. I have here with me now, here today, evidence that the security council has been transporting members of Torus station off site to conduct vile, inhumane experiments. Seems the sudden increase of in transit deaths has been a cover for creating an army of untold numbers of Guinea pigs for their medical black sites, located out in the far reaches of our solar system.” From a morbidly obese woman in the joint chiefs ranks, a shrill screech of a voice kicks up. “That’s utterly preposterous. No one could do that. Who would fund it. Who would follow orders to kidnap our own people.” She shrieks. “Exactly, Janice, my sentiments mirror your own.” Replies Cathy. Suddenly caught off guard by the calm reply, Janice shakes her head and mutters something only her junior staffers can hear. A few underlings start making calls from their wrist communicators. Another older gentleman says “These are some extraordinary accusations you are making senior director.” He spits out each word around his loose dentures. “Perhaps we should call down from the C Suites The Company administrator to peruse this so called evidence you’ve gathered. Who are your sources if I might be so bold – Cat?” The old man flails about, until his junior deputy rushes to his aid to lift him from his heavily cushioned seat. “No, you may not. Don’t bother calling the administrator, she’ll not answer.” Ms. Taylor hisses. “Ridiculous! Nonsense, we’re the board of directors. We run the day to day operations of this station. They’ll answer to us, to ME! I fucking well guarantee it!” Whirling in place, he turns to see all twenty of the gathered junior staffers all dialing, hanging up and recalling, again and again, to no avail. “No, I’m afraid The Company abandoned us some time ago, isn’t that right Todd? Our best guess is that the administrator and her staff ventured off the station in the weeks just after Margot’s Fever crashed and fizzled. Their offices look to have been abandoned for what? Todd you thought it was somewhere in the vicinity of twelve months?” The crowd looks beyond Cathy to the lithe man sat grinning with his nose in a gargantuan binder. “Best guess places it around twenty seven months ago, ma’am. They have been forwarding in coming calls to an emitter which cuts down the lag time for responses within the system. They could be anywhere within thirty au of us here and we would never know it.” A laugh from the gathered crowd. “Not possible! There is no way anyone in their right mind, that would walk away from those C Suite offices and living quarters. No, never. I don’t believe you.” With a chime, the media screen at the back of the room comes alive, to show a group of janitors and sanitation workers walking through a clearly abandoned office block. Papers are scattered on the floors, piles of ash gathered in puddles on file cabinets, scorched by fire. Frozen mugs of coffee, and half eaten bagels are on desk tops, the greenery has all overgrown their individual planters due to the automated feeders. The board room is taken over with a shocked hush. In unison, each of the geriatric members of the board say aloud. “They abandoned us. How did we not know. What is going on here?” Collapsing deep into their seats, the look of defeat etched on their pale, wrinkled faces. “That’s what I am here to tell you. If you have any insights, you voice them right here, right now. No point of interest is too small, too minute.” With a flash of colour the media screen starts to come alive with names, dates, redacted files that were surreptitiously pulled off of the security teams intranet.

The cells are buried in frigidly cold rock. The air is thick with mould and mildew. The stale air is damp and musty. The cells are little more than dog kennel sized holes in the rock walls with large heavy titanium bars for a door. The light is a sickly pale green. Somewhere the slow drip of water can be heard. The smell of human waste is strong from inside the cell that Ravindar Rashida is held inside. After the fifth day with no food and no water, he was able to shimmy about in the cell to get a look at his biometrics. The Nano bots he had recently upgraded to were working extraordinarily hard to keep him alive. Burning off sugars and fats at a drastically reduced rate, reclaiming water he still retained to maintain organ function at the minimum rates allowable to survive. From the logs the biometrics keep it shows he suffered ammonia poisoning, but was able to live through it. Though it burned his lungs and eyes, and left him weakened. But where the hell did that happen. He didn’t recognize the rock from Torus station. His GPS unit couldn’t place him anywhere in the mechanical sector of the station. From off in the darkness of the extensive corridor the soft footfalls of someone walking can be heard. As it draws closer, Ravindar realizes it isn’t one set but multiple. The soft mumble of a quiet conversation can just be made out. “Please… please I need some water. I don’t know where I am… how did I get here… please, you have to help me!” The panic and adrenaline in his voice startles the group as they pass by. “Well now, aren’t you the tenacious one. Yes, yes. Please come with me. I will set you straight.” The science officer lifts a tag on the outside of the cage door, a sardonic smile upon his face. “Mr. Ravindar Rashida. Yes. Let’s get you down to my office. Shall we?” The door latch is unhooked as the weakened man falls out onto the floor. He lands with a hard thud. Turning over on the floor the man stares into the empty eye sockets of the skeletal remains of a small child. It shrieks in pain with a long and pitiful muah!, as Ravindar scrambles to back away from the horribly emaciated figure packed inside a dark cell. She was not three feet below him this whole time. In the cages surrounding him are hundreds, no thousands of other mindless near dead people. Strong hands pull him up to his feet then he is place unceremoniously onto an ice cold gurney and wheeled off into the darkness. The medical officer and his underlings continue their conversations, as though nothing had happened.

“Let us begin with what we know. We believe that a black site has been created to house various secret operations. Our intelligence on what they are doing is sketchy at best. But we know the place is named UB313, and that is actually where it is too. They chose a dwarf planet out beyond Pluto. So no one is just going to stumble upon it. And we lack the resources to storm the place, even if we felt so inclined. We also know, because we have their official communications, that all surviving members of Margot’s Fever have been sequestered there. And we believe the stations missing people have been shipped there too. Lots of talk about squashing conspiracy theorists, quelling rebellious groups, and “euthanizing” troublesome persons in transit. I mean, Jesus. They have sop’s for gassing people in their berths for fuck’s sake.” Senior director Taylor is almost as red in the face as her burgundy jumpsuit. The room is full of shocked silence. Heads are held low, and not a single person is figeting. Near the back of the room a nondescript individual taps out a short code on her wrist communicator. The station emitter barks out a pulse and then goes dark.

“Hello Ravindar, glad you are finally awake. Well, well, well… look at you. Tell me, how do you feel?” The scientist has a glowing bed side manner, or so it would seem. “Please, water… so thirsty.” “Yes, yes, you’ve said so before. But I have a few questions for you my boy. How did you do it, huh? How did you manage to survive the ammonia leak we set off in your gel couch during transit? Hm… no, please do share.” With a smile the man pulls up a stool, a pad of paper and a pencil and waits patiently. “What?, huh… I don’t know – please you have to help me!” Ravindars pleas are a soft whistle, through his dry cracked lips. His eye lids begin to flutter heavily. “Oh no you don’t. No sense you go dying on me now. Nurse, please set him up with an iv, and let me know when he regains consciousness, we’ll start him on Project Cerebus after we gather a suitable baseline for him.” The short nurse moves in on the motionless body of Ravindar Rashida as he is strapped down to the metal gurney. The lab is fairly large, covered top to bottom in large white subway tiles, with a polished cement floor. Huge dust extraction units hang from each end of the room. There is a viewing gallery behind a mirrored glass panel near the top of the far wall. Several camera rigs with booms and stabilizers hang down from the ceiling. The scientist likes to capture every second of Project Cerebus on film for protocol review and quality control regarding his surgical precision. Written above the door in bold red letters are the words “Welcome to Hell.”

“Did no one other than myself and my immediate staff think it was strange that our security forces just spontaneously erupted up out of the ether over night? With access to ballistic weapons, armor and those teflon weave coveralls. Who designed, manufactured and brought on board all those arms and ammunition. The webbing, holsters and such? Do we have any leads on where it originated from? Anyone?” Head shakes all around the table. A somber mood pervades the conference hall. There is only standing room now, as each director brought in more and more junior staffers and advisors to help shed light on what was being uncovered by Ms. Taylor and her covert web of spies.

The lab is dimly lit as Ravindar awakes. His throat is dry, but he desperately needs to urinate. Beside his bed, a large bag is full of a dark orange brown liquid. The foul smell of urine lingers in his nostrils. The urge to itch his genitals rushes to him, until he realizes they have inserted a catheter for him. They must not realize he upgraded to Nano technology for use with his new wave biometrics unit. The lights click on and suddenly the room is too bright for Ravindar to see. Blinded by the pale white light, and the glare off the pristine white glass tile, he tries to bring his arms up to guard his face, only to find the end of the slop in his restraints. Beside him is a large media screen, a head set and some sort of clamps. “Good afternoon Ravindar. Glad you could be here with us. Nothing hard in store for you today my friend. Just some research for you to watch ok buddy.” With a quick jerk the gurney transforms from a bed to a chair. Stepping off the levers at the head of the gurney, the science officer twirls Ravindar around to face the screen. Pulling a leather strap from behind the head rest, he wraps it around his head. Looking at the monitors he decides to nudge the gurney just a hair closer to the monitors. “Ok, so big picture here. You have to be close enough that all you can see is the screen. Can’t have you staring at the bevels or off into the distance. You have to see everything on the monitors, ok? Also, incase you were hoping to sleep or shut those beautiful eyes, we’re going to keep your peepers wide open. I have numbing drops and a hyper hydrator for your pupils too. Great stuff. Great stuff. Now, you’re new here, so your first day with Project Cetebus is going to be a long one. I think we’ve trimmed this presentation down to ninety six hours. We’ll push some food through a feeding tube every six hours or so, but just sit back, relax, and enjoy the show!” As the lights are dimmed the medical officer turns to leave. “Oop almost forgot the headphones. You need to hear this to truly appreciate the situation you find yourself in.” The monitor flickers to life, with a short countdown. The medical staffer vanishes from the room. In the darkness, Ravindar can see a young girl being wheeled into the lab on a gurney similar to his. Visions of hell unfold before him. The panicked screams reverberate off the hard surfaces throughout the subterranean portion of the UB313 medical wing. In his large office, the scientist turns from his CCTV showing a bucking and wrenching Ravindar, to turn on his stereo and listen to Holst’s the planets on near constant repeat.

With a tremble Ravindar crushes his eyes closed in an attempt to stop the horrific stream of visions burned into his retinas. A small man enters the room. “Good morning Ravindar. Do you understand what you are here for now? Do you have some idea of what we are attempting to do, for all of mankind?” The young man looks to be of japanese decent, with thinning jet black hair, a wide grin, and soft friendly blue eyes. “Wh.. wh.. what’s going to happen to me?” Ravindar exclaims. “Well you see. That parts up to you. If you help us figure something out, we can put you through different tests, until you either a.) Succumb to the testing, or b.) Solve our issue and get thrown at another issue, ad infinitum.” “But, wh… why, why though. What can we do. Why do this to us.” “For all mankind, you silly goose. We have to find a suitable way to get around Galactic Cosmic Radiation, surviving Solar Proton Events, finding if a miniaturized Magnetic Field Generator can stop you from dying in the face of extreme radiation. Among other things, we want to see people become heartier in regards to inhospitable environments, toxins and a laundry list of other imminent threats.” The small doctor drops the seated gurney back into a bed. Unlocking the wheels, he pushes the cool gurney over to an air lock. “Ok my good friend, today we’re going to test your bodies response to oxygen deprivation. I have the cameras and lights set up in there all ready, so feel free to moon for the camera.” With a metal woosh, the heavy doors close, to leave a trembling Ravindar to wait on the soft hiss of escaping oxygen. The visceral stench of dread fills the room in place of the missing oxygen. Much to Ravindar’s chagrin, his Nano tech keeps him alive under the stress.

“Wait, wait, wait. The time lines seems screwy. You said they fled the Torus almost immediately, in the aftermath of the Margot’s Fever event. They must have thought it was something else than an engine malfunction. Might explain the live recordings showing black uniformed guards firing ballistic weapons out into the void, before those images were purged from the archives, and a sanitized account of events was delivered to the masses. So who did they think it was?” Again an agitated silence hangs over the gathered group. The attendants are so many the overflow is now out into the hall, and out the corridor to the lobby. The whole discussion is being broadcast across the whole floor. Some three hundred members of the Torus station are gathered to give input or just listen. “What could they possibly be doing out there in UB313. What are they trying to do?”

A long low whistle. “Well fuck me, you must be a gods be damned superman. I did not think you’d survive exposure to total vacuum. You surprise us at every turn. But what we gather from our instrumentation, you aren’t much different than myself or anyone else for that matter. How do you do it Ravindar.” It’s more of a statement at this point than a question. The life in his eyes fades a little bit every day. For months now, he has been subject to all manner of torture, or testing as they call it. Ravindar’s best guess is they want to beef up humans to survive interstellar travel over incredibly long periods of time and distance.

“Can I get a tally of what suits the administrators and attendant staff were wearing when they fled? Personal artifacts, food, supplies, anything like that. Compare it to the missing people and those who “died” in transit over the last decade. Cross reference, and cross check all of it, on screen, now please.” With a blip, the data spools on screen as tiny packets of data are pooled into larger groups, on and on, with each variable listed in the query. Todd is typing furiously.

“Seriously Ravindar, how the fuck do you do it? How the fuck are you still alive!” Shouts Dr. Jang directly into the unresponsive Ravindar’s face. Though not dead, he has retreated far back into the dark reaches of his mind. Sanity has long since fled his clutches. In a fit on anger the doctor kicks the gurney, breaking his big toe on his right foot. “FUCK!” The call echoes down the halls.

“The only thing that ninety nine point nine nine percent have in common are the jumpsuits they were issued. Our standard Scalzi model coverall. Replete with catheter system as part of the internal rigging. The only one not wearing that was Ravindar Rashida, a level three cert generalist mechanic who was married to Lt. Anise Rashida, a security chief in your section ma’am.” Cathy Taylor looks up from her large stack of reading materials. “Wait. What was he wearing?” “According to the visitor logs, and the crew manifest from the capsule named Gemini, he had on the new experimental Nano infused system, that melds with his DNA/RNA identifiers. Pretty high tech stuff. I guess he was gearing up to work deep space, or now this is sketchy but, I saw mention that he had been selected to be working on something called a Fabric of Reality field generator. The Company had it listed as an Zulu Alpha Prometheus level priority. Never heard of that before. But I can’t cross reference that with anything else, so it could be nothing but a red herring.” Says Todd.

“Incoming call on line one for HR Senior director Catherine Taylor. Priority one call from the off station CEO of The Company.” The automated pa system rings straight through to Cathy’s suites. Sitting up in bed, in the darkness of night, a handful of words are displayed on the wall opposite her bed. “An emissary from The Company has been dispatched to Torus station. ETA ninety days – end transmission.” “Well now, this is an interesting development.” Cathy flops back into bed. The darkness surrounds her.

 

PART XVIII