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
Greatwall Studios Graphic Design 
You must be logged in to post a comment.