The Colonists Read online

  The Colonists

  The Skidian Chronicles Part Four

  Written by Keith Fenwick

  Copyright Keith Fenwick 2018

  All rights reserved

  The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, transcribed, stored in a retrieval system, or translated into any other language or computer language, in any form or by any means, whether it be electronic, mechanical, magnetic, optical, manual, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of Keith Fenwick.

  Email: [email protected]

  PO Box 90312

  Auckland

  New Zealand

  Also, by Keith Fenwick and available in Kindle or paperback versions.

  Part one of the Skidian Chronicles - The First Chronicle

  Part two of the Skidian Chronicles -The Second Coming

  Part three of the Skidian Chronicles - The Lifeboat

  Web http://scifibookshop.co.nz/

  Keithfenwick.com

  Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SkidianChronicles/

  Disclaimer

  These novels are works of fiction. Any resemblance to any real event, person, or institution contained within these pages is purely coincidental. Well, this is my story and I am sticking to it.

  Once again thanks to Joyce for the support and encouragement.

  If this is the first book in the series you have sampled and enjoyed, I hope you will also download, enjoy and review the other books in the Skidian Chronicles series - Skid - the first Skidian Chronicle, The Second Coming, and The Lifeboat

  Every review helps independent writers like myself get noticed and sell more books. If I start to generate enough sales to get by on, she who must be obeyed might let me give up my day job and write full time.

  Liking my Amazon author page and the Skidian Chronicles Facebook page also helps. You can also sign up on my blog at http://scifibookshop.co.nz/ where I post various updates and random musings. I also have an online shop at Keithfenwick.com

  A cast of characters is located at the end of the book.

  The story so far.

  The Skidian Chronicles series was originally intended to be a trilogy. However, after completing the first three books, I felt the characters still had enough life left in them, and I had a rich vein of subject matter to fill the book you are now reading.

  In the first novel of the series, Skid is in desperate straits. The factories producing the synthetic products Skidians rely on for their food supplies are failing after being devastated by a virus. The virus was introduced by an exiled heir to the leader of the planet, intent on revenge against his father and regaining what he considers is his birth right.

  The Main Processing Unit (the artificial intelligence tasked with monitoring and maintaining Skidian infrastructure) should have contained and eliminated the attack. However, it suffered a processing glitch at this critical time, and to make matters worse, chose completely the wrong moment to undertake one of its intermittent re-boots and self-diagnostic checks.

  So, the Skidians are faced with famine. With the MPU essentially unresponsive, a group of Skidians decide to take matters into their own hands, and visit the planet known to them as the offworld (Earth), seeking experts in organic food production. They have a vague notion this will help them to develop alternative food supplies, to save at least some of the population from starvation. Unfortunately, they have no understanding of what a solution might entail and the impact on Skidian life.

  It will come as no surprise to any reader the Skidians are no strangers to earth, they have a long association with our planet.

  The first two novels in the series follow the adventures of Bruce, a farmer from New Zealand who has been abducted by the Skidians, and Sue, who is mistaken for an expert in organic food production. She happened to be tramping through a forest at the time the Skidians stumbled across her.

  Bruce develops a New Zealand style grasslands farm, showcasing how the Skidians could easily go about overcoming the approaching famine and feed themselves. However, this is a step too far for the Skidians who simply cannot conceive of a solution which requires them to literally get their hands dirty in the process. While the farm is a success, the overall enterprise is a strategic failure. With famine imminent, Bruce and a now-pregnant Sue are returned to their former lives on earth, albeit with a few unanswered questions bugging them after a partially successful memory wipe removing any recollection or knowledge of Skid from their consciousness.

  The third novel in the series, The Lifeboat, opens with a large rock hurtling towards earth, an asteroid large enough to trigger a global extinction event if it impacts. However, its arrival, a cosmic mystery to astronomers, is no random event and it swings into a safe and stable orbit about the planet.

  In The Lifeboat, we learn more about the Transcendents, the real Skidians who inhabit a galactic version of the cloud. Their bodies were destroyed as part of the transcending process, and their species continuity plan is to download themselves into human bodies in response to an event which threatens their existence, which they deem far superior to their own flesh and blood vessels.

  When challenged as to why they are unable to clone their own supply of bodies instead of uploading new ones from earth, they claim their cloning technology is immature and unreliable.

  In The Lifeboat, it is also revealed that the team of Transcendents tasked with managing the MPU failed to meet their performance objectives. Had they done their job properly, the virus wouldn't have been contracted and the food shortages would never have occurred.

  The Colonists takes up the story of the Mars for You (MFY) program, which was initiated in The Lifeboat. As far as anyone is aware, MFY is a reality television show. The participants are competing for a place on a mission to resettle on the moon and Mars, via an asteroid, now in orbit about Earth. The show is a front for Bruce and the Transcendents to facilitate the upload of tens of thousands of people to replenish Skid’s population. The ultimate destination of the participants is not the moon or Mars. It’s Skid.

  The action then moves to the period immediately post the implementation or upload process when the new and indoSkidians are beginning to interact with each other on Skid.

  A sub-plot initiated in The Lifeboat and evolving in The Colonists explains the truth behind the dark forces influencing the 2016 United States elections.

  Prologue ……continued

  Mavis Harwood found it impossible to keep the tears out of her eyes as she watched the bride and groom exchange their wedding vows. She had always hoped Bruce would settle down and find himself a nice local girl to marry and now her wish was coming true. She had dreamt of a traditional wedding at her church, followed by a grand reception at the local hall, in front of all her friends and family. Her family and Cyril’s side would turn out in their droves, along with a hand-picked smattering of locals, and a few guests from the bride’s family.

  So far, so good. While the big day was not turning out quite the way she had imagined, it was not far short of perfection.

  Part One

  One

  Morris Thwaites picked himself up off the ground where he had been unceremoniously dumped on his backside a few moments before, brushing a few stray grass clippings off his pants. He had no idea where he was and there were no landmarks he recognised.

  He was standing in an empty paddock in the middle of nowhere, with not a fence, tree, or animal to be seen. The grass at his feet looked like it might have been freshly trimmed with a set of clippers.

  The contrast with his home of the last few months couldn’t have been greater. This was a lush, green, environment, a world away from the harsh desert
where the Mars for You spaceport and main training facility had been established.

  In the distance, he glimpsed the outline of a built-up area and for want of any better idea started walking in that general direction. The smell of freshly mown grass filled his nostrils, and pieces of cut grass had stuck to his feet and legs.

  It had already been an interesting day for Morris. It had started in a classroom, an interactive high intensity training environment in which he learnt all there was to know about space station environmental control systems. It was part of the accelerated astronaut training program he had been assigned to on joining the MFY movement. In previous sessions, he had learnt the systems were fail-safe, with multiple redundancies, but he still needed a basic understanding of how they operated in the unlikely case of an emergency. Morris treated the course as a bit of a joke. In his mind it was just like an aircraft safety briefing: if you needed to follow the safety instructions, your chances of survival were already slim. He didn’t want to dwell on this ambiguity, one of many the enterprise had thrown up since he had joined.

  There was a lot of talk about automated cloud-based systems, backups, and artificial intelligence, to put the trainees at ease. Most of them were comfortable with the idea of a machine autonomously regulating their environment. However, lurking in the back of Morris’s mind was what would happen when the ‘fuck up fairy came to town’, because it surely would at some point. What would happen if something went wrong, which they couldn’t repair, when Mars and the Earth were maybe four hundred million kilometres apart? The cavalry wouldn’t get there in time to save them. Morris's need for answers intensified day by day, hour by hour, but nobody else was concerned.

  There were other things which quite didn't add up for Morris, but he could never put his finger on what these were. One moment he could articulate them clearly in his thoughts, the next he had forgotten what troubled him. All that remained was a faint niggle in the back of his mind.

  Online learning usually involved a human instructor speaking over a video link of some kind, but much of their training had been delivered by an electronic narrator. When there was human input, Morris felt they were reading from a carefully prepared script and were going through the motions, understanding about as much of the subject matter as he did.

  Morris was having real doubts about the program and was beginning to think he might have been duped again. It would be a personal disaster for him if he had. It would be more difficult to recover from this setback, emotionally and financially, than the last time he had been taken in by the promises of the initial MFY scheme. He was now older and far less resilient.

  “How can an intelligent man be so gullible? How could you let them fleece you, not once, but twice?” his long-suffering wife had asked as he walked out of the house for the last time on his way to the MFY enrolment centre. “Do you have a bug in your brain that stops you using the little common sense you have when these snake oil salesmen talk about sending people to Mars?”

  But she didn’t try very hard to stop him. “Don’t bother coming back!” she yelled after him as a parting shot.

  Initially, there had been the token request for cash - a simple administration fee to join the movement - then once he had been accepted, MFY had started to pay him as promised. Pay him well enough to keep his soon to be ex-wife quiet, and for her to rue the day she'd chased him out of the door.

  The original MFY organisation had been driven by a group of budding entrepreneurs who had dreamt up the idea of funding a Mars space program by turning it into one big reality show. Morris had originally paid a substantial fee to join a mailing list. List members could then apply for selection to join an elite group who would train for, and eventually be shot off to, Mars.

  The Mars mission was a one-way trip, and if a Martian colony was successfully established and proved to be sustainable, there would be immense public pressure on the major global space agencies to mount a successful rescue and replenishment mission. That was the pitch of the MFY team who maintained there would be a race to ‘rescue’ the Martian colonists.

  It was exciting to be part of the MFY missions, but Morris had no realistic expectations of being selected to go into space. He knew there were risks involved, the biggest one being whether the project would get off the ground in the first place, so he hadn’t been completely surprised when the original program, despite the glossy promotional material and extensive, fawning media coverage of stage-managed selection programs, eventually collapsed. This first iteration was soon exposed as a devious scheme which peddled unattainable dreams to anyone gullible enough to part with their hard-earned cash.

  Once the initial program flopped, a few office administrators and a pile of unpaid bills were all that was left of an organisation with plans to shoot rockets to Mars. The office workers clearly knew very little. The perpetrators of the scam were long gone and proved impossible to locate.

  It had therefore been something of a surprise when the MFY program was mysteriously resuscitated soon afterwards, and even more surprisingly, was supported by an organisation of substance.

  An unexpected email had dropped into Morris's inbox. If he was still interested in going to Mars, there would be a no strings attached free return ticket to a training base being built in the middle of the South Australian desert. All he had to do was pay a small joining fee (it didn’t even cover the cost of the airfare!) which would be refunded with his first pay cheque, if he chose to stay.

  This professional approach convinced Morris that the new MFY program was legitimate and was sufficient proof that a real organisation was dedicated to shooting for the stars. If he needed further evidence, he got it on arrival at the training base, which was regularly shaken by the thunderous roar of rockets lifting off from the adjacent space port. The rockets carried cargo of components, habitation units, and other supplies, to the moon and Mars. The program was more advanced than he could have imagined. This organisation wasn't merely promising to go into space. By the looks of things, it was already there.

  However, as time went on, though he could never put his finger on what had triggered his unease, Morris felt there was something about the whole enterprise which didn’t ring true. Thousands of people had arrived at the MFY base, but few were known to have left. It was like a huge, well-managed university campus or resort hotel, with few staff in evidence. Most of the MFYers did little more than laze about the pool or frequent the many gyms, bars, and cafés on the site.

  All these people couldn’t be going to Mars, surely? Morris had asked himself. Only a few of them had been assigned to training for technical assignments. Why had he been selected for training, when he had no skills or previous experience in any technical or scientific subject? He thought he would be far more usefully employed in administration, because this was the only area not functioning with the same precision as other activities at the complex.

  He was an accountant with an interest in space exploration, not a technician. When he had arrived, he had been assigned to a training cadre with no questions asked. Unlike the people who treated the place like a huge resort hotel and kept themselves busy with the recreational activities, he had a real vocation. He also knew, unlike most of his fellow MFYers, that he was being given a real shot at being part of a Mars-bound crew. This excited him and kept him engaged, despite his growing doubts.

  It was difficult to work out who was really in charge and who could answer his questions. Drones, and some very sophisticated and officious robots, roamed the corridors of the huge complex. There was a small human team who worked in the campus administration block, but they kept aloof from the MFYers. After a tentative inquiry, Morris realised most of the ‘staff’ were simply early arrivals at the facility and knew little more than he did. Their sole occupation was to as assign new arrivals to training or recreation teams, and they didn’t need to exert themselves in this role. Questions about who created the assignments were ignored with a shrug of the shoulders. A frustrated Morris decided t
he robots ran the place and the human administrators were just there for show.

  He met a few qualified technical instructors who had previously worked with various international space agencies. They were older than the bulk of the MFYers. Morris suspected many of them had retired and been brought back into service and saw the MFY project as an opportunity to relive past glories and feel useful again. Above all, the MFY base felt more like a relaxed university campus than an intensive training camp. Something didn’t quite pass the sniff test.

  While he struggled to follow the narrator and get his head around the hologram of the interactive environmental controls he was supposed to be mastering, Morris asked himself the same question over and over. Had it ever been a realistic expectation that an organisation based on donations sent in to a reality television program could finance and develop the infrastructure to send people on a journey to Mars and establish a sustainable settlement on the planet’s surface?

  There was evidence of real science and engineering on the site: the rockets heading into the sky, this facility, and the technology he had at his fingertips. But something didn’t add up and Morris resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery, even if it meant he had been duped and had to return to the real world.

  Then, after days of angst, before he was aware what was happening, and with a swiftness which completely disoriented him, Morris experienced a sensation akin to being sucked up by an enormous vacuum cleaner and sent tumbling down a pipe. His arms and legs flailed as he tried to keep his balance. Before he could understand what had happened, he was deposited in a huge empty space with a high vaulted roof, like an old-fashioned railway station or airline terminal.

  He looked up and was stunned by the scene confronting him. The ceiling was translucent. He was standing underneath a large dome. He looked closer and above his head hung a black landscape dotted with lights, dominated by one large bright globe.