‘It's a cargo bay,’ said Ellie.
‘Geee, you really think so?'
Ellie panned her torch around. ‘Looks like it hasn’t been used for a while. Why did they drop us here and not at Gateway?’
Jez shook her head. ‘Dunno. Maybe they just got fed up with us.'
Ellie suspected the freighter's captain had figured out he was carrying fugitives from the law, that or had begun to worry they might be carriers of some kind of virulent plague. Either way it seemed he'd decided to ditch them.
Jez curled her lips at the dust and grime. ‘And where the freg is ‘here’, anyway?’
‘Some place that looks like it’s been abandoned.’
‘Great.’
Behind them, the automated barge sounded a soft insistent beep, and the amber warning lights stopped rotating and began to blink. It was getting ready to leave.
‘We could get back on it,’ said Jez.
'And when the crew find us, they’ll just send the barge right back here again.’
Or worse.
Ellie stepped off the ramp, onto the floor of the cargo bay. The ramp’s motors were already whining; getting ready to lift up. Jez joined her, stepping out into the gloom. ‘Well if we're staying we better find the exit quick-ish.’
Ellie presumed - hoped - the cargo bay’s inner and outer bulkhead doors wouldn’t open simultaneously while there were still people inside, blasting them out into space. A safety precaution she was pretty certain all non-planetary installation cargo bays must surely have built in. She wasn’t inclined to hang about and test that theory though.
‘Over there!’ said Jez.
Ellie followed the path of her torch beam and spotted a small sealed hatchway marked with an Exit sign above. She was relieved to see a small blinking green light beside it.
It was powered.
At least this place wasn’t a derelict structure. She recalled Captain Darcy from Space Fugitive (Jez’s 2nd favourite sopa-dram) saying that this system had quite a number of mothballed installations. Periodic cycles of boom and bust tended to result in dozens of ambitious projects being left half-built, abandoned and floating in orbit, patiently awaiting more favourable economic times before they were dusted down and finished off.
But then again it was just a day time soap opera. And Captain Darcy wasn't real.
They walked quickly across the bay towards the exit, while behind them the automated barge had decided it had waited around long enough. The ramp began to crank upwards with the noisy growl of neglected servo motors.
Jez quickly hit the switch beside the green light and the airlock hatch rattled open. They stepped through into the airlock beyond and it closed again behind them. Several pallid strip lights flickered and winked on as the girls looked back through the thick glass of the door at their barge as the ramp sealed shut with a heavy clang.
‘There goes our lift,’ said Jez sombrely.
The roof of the cargo bay hissed clouds of gas as large pneumatic pistons pulled open the inner bulkheads. The barge lifted up slowly with roaring thrusters pummelling the floor. Ellie could feel the vibration of that drumming through the floor, through her platform boots, tickling her toes. She craned her neck to watch it gently rise into an outer bay. Another hiss and cloud of gas as the bulkhead swung down again and she finally lost sight of the barge that had brought them here.
Muted now, they heard the faint cranking of outer doors opening and the roar of decompression. The rumble of the barge's thrusters was suddenly gone, swallowed up by the vacuum beyond. She felt the slightest vibration once more as the outer doors closed.
It was deathly quiet and unnervingly still.
‘We have been totally fregged-over,’ said Jez. ‘The captain, that fat rat-face dill-head took the money and totally humped us.' She growled. 'We should be at Gateway not at this dump!' She swung a limp kick at the wall beside her. ‘Two minutes…that’s all I’d want; two minutes with my fist and his fat flabby arse…’
What if this place really is derelict? Ellie began to feel the tremulous start of claustrophobic panic. We're gonna die in here!
Just then they heard a thunk. It came from beyond the small hatch at the other end of the airlock. They heard a mechanical whine and Ellie guessed it must be the door on another connected airlock, opening.
Okay. Maybe it's not totally derelict.
Then another sound, a light tap-tap-tap of approaching footsteps. The girls looked at each other anxiously.
‘At least it’s not totally abandoned.’ Ellie forced a look of relief onto her face. ‘At least there's someone else here. That’s good. Right?’
Jez cocked a brow. ‘Just our luck, it’ll be some lonely psycho axe murderer.’ Her bravado seemed to falter for a moment as her dark eyes rounded. ‘Just like that perv-slasher holodram we watched a while back? Remember? What was it called?’
Ellie remembered watching it, and still rather wished she hadn’t. ‘Uh…Lonely Psycho Axe Murderer, wasn’t it?’ She bit her lip. ‘Or something like that.’
The footsteps were getting louder, clearer, closer. Slow, ominous footsteps approaching them. She fancied she could just about hear the rasping breath and insane gibbering of some Total Crazy.
‘Oh crud,’ she whispered. ‘Cruddy-crud-crud.’
They stared at the grime encrusted window of the inner hatch and saw an indistinct movement of shadow. Some figure right outside, close to the scuffed foggy glass, something swaying, bobbing creepily. The figure seemed short to Ellie. Shorter than either of them; perhaps it was just the foreshortening angle of the shadow cast by an overhead light beyond.
Please make him short. Make him short and puny and harmless. And not a psycho.
They heard a soft click followed by the gentle electronic hum of the door’s servo. The inner door slid slowly upwards revealing a pair of odd-looking, hand-like, hairy feet. Then, slowly, revealing the rest.
Jez let out a small strangled cry. ‘OhMyGod!’
Ellie gasped.
‘OHMYGOD!’ cried Jez again, ‘that’s….that’s so freggin’ cute!’
Ellie gazed round-eyed and slack-jawed at the creature slouching in the doorway. She recognized it for what it was; a creature from Old Earth. One of the many species that went extinct many hundreds of years ago in the late twenty-first century. She trawled her mind for the word. Then she had it.
A monkey.
To be more precise; a monkey wearing a smart, burgundy coloured stewards’ jacket with gold buttons and braiding, and a bellboy’s cap tilted back at a jaunty angle.
‘It's a…a monkey?’ gasped Ellie.
‘Oh, good grief,’ it sighed patronisingly. ‘A bonobo chimp actually.’
‘OhMyGod!’ yelped Jez. ‘It…it talks too!’
The chimp looked at Jez then shook his head wearily. He trained his big dewy brown-eyes back on Ellie. ‘Is your friend normally this rude?’
CHAPTER 5
‘Frasier? Seriously?’
The chimpanzee sighed as he led them up the dimly lit passageway. He walked with an awkward gait, on the outer edges of his feet, his thumb-like toes brushing past each other with every step.
‘Yes. Frasier. Not Freddy, or Reggie, or Benny…or any other insultingly cute pet name you might care to think of. The name's Frasier.’
Jez chuckled with delight and nudged Ellie. ‘He’s the coolest monkey I’ve ever met.’
Frasier looked up at her with poorly concealed disdain. ‘I’d imagine I'm the only ‘monkey’ you’ve ever met.’
‘Excuse her,' said Ellie. 'She can be a bit blunt.’
‘And what are you people called?’
‘I’m Ellie, and this is Jez.’
He stopped in his tracks and lifted his cap. ‘Greetings, Ellie and Jez.’
‘Very pleased to meet you, Frasier,’ said Ellie offering her hand. He nodded approvingly at the gesture and grasped her hand. ‘The pleasure’s all mine, m’dear.’ He replaced his cap and resumed leading them along the passage.
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‘Forgive me, Frasier, but you must be some sort of genetic product? Right?’
‘I prefer the term ‘engineered individual’. But yes. Designed, fabricated and AI-programmed all at this facility.’ They approached an intersection of passageways, all of them dimly lit by orange service lights. He gestured. ‘We take a right, here.’
‘What is this place, Frasier?’
‘You might have heard of it. Most probably not. It’s called WonderLand.’
Ellie shook her head. ‘No. I don’t think I-’
‘Hang on,’ said Jez. ‘I’ve heard of it. Isn’t WonderLand some sort of a holiday place?’
‘An exclusive luxury theme park,’ he corrected her.
‘Yeah, that’s it.’
Ellie looked around at the dark, grimy bulkhead walls, lined with power conduits and drooping loops of tag-tied cables. ‘It doesn’t really look very luxury to me.’
‘This is the mezzanine deck,’ he replied. ‘I assure you, it does get a lot more appealing up above.’
‘Is that where everyone is?’ asked Jez.
They stopped beside the closed doors of an elevator. ‘Mother? It’s Frasier.’
A soothing feminine voice replied from a wall speaker. ‘Hello Frasier.’ Above the speaker a small screen winked on and displayed a cartoon image of a matronly woman; grey hair in a bun, glasses and a kindly maternal smile.
‘Elevator for the guest decks please, Mother.’
‘Of course, Frasier. Just one moment and I’ll have it there for you.’
‘The guest deck? Is that where everyone is?’ asked Jez.
Frasier bent down and rubbed one of his bare feet. It looked like it was troubling him. The tired upright way he shuffled along appeared to Ellie to be awkward for him. She wondered whether, out of sight, he normally resorted to walking around on all fours.
‘It’s where Shelby is,’ replied Frasier.
‘Who’s Shelby?’ asked Jez.
He looked up at them. 'My Creator, of course.'
The elevator doors parted with a soft hiss and Frasier led the way inside. They were standing in a small cylindrical plexitex blister that showed nothing beyond but darkness, pipes and power cables outside.
‘Shelby?’ said Jez. ‘Is that, like, another monkey?’
‘No,’ replied Frasier, testily. ‘He’s one of WonderLand's Architechs.’
The doors hissed shut and they felt the elevator lift gently.
‘We were not expecting a shuttle for another few months,’ said Frasier. ‘And we certainly weren't expecting any visitors.’
‘No visitors?’ Ellie looked down at him. ‘Is this place not open then?’
He shook his head. ‘It has never been open. In fact, the construction on this facility was never completed. Watch your eyes…'
Just then, the elevator emerged from the subterranean gloom of the mezzanine decks into the dazzling glow of sunlight.
'The guest dome,' announced Frasier.
Both girls gasped excitedly at the view outside as the elevator quickly ascended. Ellie pressed up against the perspex. ‘Oh, my! It’s…so beautiful!'
The view took her breath away. As they climbed she could see rolling meadows of flowers and lush green grass leading up to a village on the brow of a hill; picture-postcard villas clustered around a central piazza. Villas with dazzling white-washed walls, warm clay brown terracotta tiled roofs and large windows flanked by shutters painted mint green. Walkways and terraces and courtyards. Paths made of paving stones, weaving through brightly coloured flowerbeds.
The epitome of luxury and sedate beauty, a perfect façade of an Old Earth summer-baked village bathed in the dazzling light and warmth of an artificial equatorial sun.
As they rose further she could see this world existed within a gigantic biosphere, approximately a mile in diameter. The sky was made up of hundreds of triangular shaped panels that gradually sloped towards a rounded 'roof' above them. Ellie guessed each of those vast panels must have been a hundred feet on each side. Most of them contributed to the almost completely convincing illusion of a salmon pink, sunrise sky. But half a dozen isolated panels hung incongruously in the dawn sky, pitch black and shockingly out of place. She wondered if they were broken, or if that was some deliberate design choice. Staring at them she realised they weren't black panels, they were transparent revealing the ink black void of empty space beyond.
As they continued their slow ascent she glimpsed through one of them, a long tunnel leading out into the darkness towards what appeared to be another giant sphere.
‘This is triple-plus wowsome,’ gasped Jez. ‘I mean, totally, WOW!’
‘Is that another sphere I'm seeing out there?’ said Ellie.
‘We call these spheres, biomes,’ said Frasier. ‘This central biome is the guest accommodation hub. There are others. Those are the various recreational worlds. There are eight in total, although only three were completed before this facility was put on hold.’
She gazed in awe again at the sky projected from the hundreds of panels; fluffy pink clouds lit warmly from below by the rising sun, drifting lazily. A beautiful and utterly convincing spectacle save for the half a dozen pitch black triangles dotted here and there, hanging in the sky like vast motionless delta-winged craft.
Frasier noted her staring at them. 'Some of the biome projection panels are yet to be hooked up and programmed. This biome was so very nearly completed before work stopped. Ah…we are approaching the Control Tower.'
The girls were suddenly robbed of the spectacular view as the elevator ascended through the roof of the central biome and once again they were plunged into darkness.
‘And here we are,’ said Frasier. The doors to the elevator hissed open. ‘Systems Control Deck,’ announced the matronly cartoon face beside the door.
'Thank you, Mother,' replied Frasier.
The girls stared out at a sprawling circular control room full of holo-displays and consoles. Chest-high cubicles and desks, office chairs and plastic potted plants. The low ceiling reflected the warm glow of sunrise streaming up through the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran all the way around.
To Ellie's eyes, it looked like this deck had been designed for hundreds of personnel. She imagined, had this theme park been up and running, it would have been a hive of activity; technicians monitoring the world beneath them, tweaking environmental variables and conditions, catering to the whims of the many wealthy and pampered guests down below. But instead it was a still and silent place.
Yet it looked lived in.
On a desk nearby she spotted unwashed plates encrusted with the desiccated leftovers of food. She spotted a pair of twisted underpants on the floor and socks balled and tossed carelessly aside. She spotted clothing draped over a loop of cable, used as a makeshift laundry line and other cables snaking over the top of several of the cubicle partitions. Several cover panels had been pulled from consoles descending from the low ceiling, their innards of wire and circuit boards spilling out. Frasier cupped his gibbon lips with his long-fingered leathery hands and called out. ‘SHELBY!’
A head shot up from between distant partitions like a startled meerkat alerted by the growl of an approaching predator. The head turned their way and then suddenly jerked with surprise; wide-eyed with a gawping ‘O’mouth. A head topped with an untidy mop of rust coloured curly hair. Beneath the mop, skin as pale as paper and dotted with faint flecks of skin-toned freckles.
‘Who…WHO…THE…HELL…IS…THAT?!’
CHAPTER 6
The head ducked down amid the maze of cubicle partitions. They heard the patter of bare feet and a bin being accidentally kicked somewhere amongst the labyrinth, followed by a muttered curse, then, finally, the head appeared again around the side of a partition just a few yards away from them.
‘Frasier! I have no clothes! Hand me my clothes!’
The chimp hobbled wearily across the floor, bending over and picking up discarded garments as he went, then passed the bu
ndle to the young man who ducked out of sight again.
Ellie glanced at Jez and they both shared a grin. They could hear the young man behind the partition, wrestling with his clothes, grunting and cursing as he hurriedly untangled them, turned them right-side out and jerked them on.
Finally he emerged, disheveled and flustered, looking warily at them through narrowed, suspicious eyes. He tried patting down his unruly hair, to no effect.
‘Who…who are you? Where did you come from?’ His voice was high pitched, almost feminine. ‘I mean…I mean, we weren’t expecting a supply shuttle for months yet. Not for months!’
‘Your monkey said that already,’ said Jez.
‘We were dropped here by an automated barge,' said Ellie. 'A barge from a passing freighter.’ She shrugged. ‘We were sort of stowaways on board and they kind of decided to dump us here.’
‘That’s not what those fregs promised us,’ said Jez with a sulky grunt. ‘They were meant to be dropping us off at-‘
‘Somewhere else,’ cut in Ellie quickly. She looked pointedly at Jez.
Little information as possible? Remember? We’re on the run?
The young man’s eyes eyes narrowed further. ‘So why here? No one comes here.’
‘We weren’t given a choice in the matter,’ said Ellie. The young man appeared to be extremely uncomfortable, fidgeting with the cuff of his shirt – rolling it up one pale forearm then unrolling it all the way down again.
‘I guess this was the nearest place they could find to dump us,' she added.
‘No one comes here,’ he said again.
‘I’m really sorry we’ve been dropped on you. Shelby is it?’
He was rocking gently from side to side, licking his dry lips, pinching and tugging on the bottom one.
‘Yes…yes, I’m Shelby.’
Ellie waited a moment for him to ask their names. He didn’t.
‘Well, I’m Ellie, this is Jez.’
No second names. She decided if he asked, she’d better have a bogus second name to hand just in case.
Jez raised a hand. ‘Are you the only one here? Are you, like, totally in charge of this place?' She grinned. 'It’s pretty awesomoza!’