Chapter Three
“Ready?” asked Professor Jackson.
“As I’ll ever be,” I replied as I took my place in the spindly office chair inside the glass cubicle. It rocked precariously under my weight, and I gripped the sides with both hands. I could think of nothing more embarrassing than destroying the furniture and forfeiting my only chance at glimpsing the future.
The professor stepped in after me and the space shrank alarmingly, particularly when the stale reek of his sweat followed him inside. He was obviously too busy inventing to take a shower, I thought, as I tried to breathe through my mouth.
“You’ll need to wear this protective eyewear,” the unwashed scientist told me as he handed me a pair of rubber-rimmed spectacles. I put them on and as he tightened them they hugged my face like a pair of swimming goggles. A curly electrical cable ran from one side of these highly unfashionable glasses down across the floor and out through a reinforced hole in the glass, to the computer console outside. They were already uncomfortable, but at least I could rip them off if I had to. I blinked and tried to focus through them, realizing they had been tinted pink.
“Well, this gives a whole new meaning to the phrase looking at the world through rose colored glasses,” I couldn’t help imparting.
“They all say that when they first put them on,” Jackson declared. “I just thought that color would be calming, since some of the things people have seen have been pretty horrific.”
“Don’t worry,” I replied. “There isn’t much that can faze me. I’ve seen just about every doomsday movie that’s ever been made.” Why those End of the World movies so fascinated me I’ll never know, but I’d watched my favorites many times over during those long, lonely months I’d sat at home waiting for my mother to die. I know that sounds awful, but in the end that was exactly how it had felt, as she lay there day in and day out with no change in her condition. Until one night she must have decided enough was enough, and she simply stopped breathing. Finding her dead the next morning had still made me feel sick to my stomach, even though I'd been expecting it. I guess no one knows how they will react until it actually happens to them.
“One of the reasons we chose you, Ruth Clarke,” the professor replied with a snort, nearly gassing me with the aromatic aroma of last night’s garlic feast. I gagged, almost adding another stain to his grubby lab coat. “But watching it and living through it are two entirely different things,” he reminded me.
“Have you actually used this contraption yourself?” I felt compelled to ask.
“Of course, but for some reason I always see exactly the same thing.” He sounded disappointed.
“Which is?” I prompted.
He waggled a long bony digit in front of my face. “Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? Now I just need to attach a couple of small probes to your temples so that we can read your brainwaves and record what you see.”
That might make ripping the whole thing off a tad more difficult, but not impossible.
Once he had glued two pads to my head, he finally backed himself and his aromatic body odors out of the cubicle. I took a deep breath, glad I could at last breathe through my nose again. All that shallow breathing had been making me feel rather light-headed.
“I’m going to take you further than anyone else has ever gone before,” the prof called through the speakers above my head. I watched him position himself in front of the keyboard. It looked a bit like a TARDIS console, with all those levers, switches and cables hanging above it. I hoped that dangerous-looking lash-up would hold together. Jackson gave me a yellow-toothed grin of anticipation and I shuddered. With a bit of luck, I’d soon be looking at my own interpretation of the future.
With ample time to ponder over the two days it had taken for his team to get back to me after the briefing, I decided this aging geek had to be a charlatan, or at the very best, someone so obsessed with his project he’d make up everything to get the results he longed for. After all, if he truly was a crackpot, he wouldn’t be working for the University of New South Wales. He’d be skulking in a basement somewhere with his giant super-computer and Tesla coils. I wondered how he’d managed to get the university to fund this experiment in the first place.
I didn’t know much about how these things worked, but perhaps he was a good lecturer, and had simply been given free rein of this dingy basement to tinker in his spare time.
“How about three-hundred years?” He winked, looking smugly pleased with himself. “I’ve been doing some tinkering and upped the power, so there shouldn’t be a problem pushing you that far.”
“Sure, go right ahead.” I started to drum my fingers against the underside of the chair’s armrest. I encountered hardened chewing gum. Ugh, weren’t uni students supposed to be more mature than school kids?
The goggles started to buzz as the mad scientist upped the power or whatever he was doing to align his machine with the future. His image began to blur and the pink glass darkened. Something was definitely happening to my vision, because colors began to swirl rather sickeningly in front of my eyes.
“See anything yet?” he asked through the loudspeakers.
“Nothing that makes any sense,” I replied truthfully.
“That’s just you traveling though time to reach your destination.”
Yeah, right. More like you fiddling with the VR channel. But I didn’t say anything else, as the colors continued to flash. I was starting to feel rather queasy.
“Almost there… Ah… twenty-three twelve,” he announced proudly.
Almost on cue the swirling miasma cleared and I caught sight of bright sunlight filtering through a huge domed ceiling. I blinked rapidly, feeling like my head was about to explode. The pressure against my face was so intense, I was about to rip the goggles off when I felt my whole body flung backward.
Then I was falling, as though the floor had suddenly opened up beneath me.
The back of my head struck the ground hard, jerking my eyes open, once again revealing that domed, sun dappled roof. Suddenly a number of unfamiliar faces filled my vision, blocking out the sunlight. They all started talking at once, almost deafening me.
“Move aside. Move aside,” boomed an authoritative voice, and the faces slipped back out of my line of sight. A fleshy, middle aged man appeared above me. “Are you all right Miss?” he asked, his brow creasing in concern.
No one had called me ‘miss’ in a long time. It had been ‘ma’am’ or ‘madam’ for as long as I could remember, and once even ‘grandma’.
“Ah,” I croaked. “I – I think so.” That voice didn’t sound like mine. I cleared my throat several times.
“You fainted by the looks of it,” the genial man said. “Do you think you can get up yet?” He leaned forward and extended a hand. I saw he was wearing some sort of uniform, navy blue in color, with strange zigzag runes on the shoulders and an official-looking stylized symbol stamped onto the pockets, that looked like a mechanical bird, or spaceship in flight.
I nodded, for some reason not trusting myself to speak. I placed my hand in his, and he easily pulled my up from the floor. He was obviously stronger than he looked, because I was no lightweight, having put on more kilos than I cared to count in the years spent nursing my mother.
For a moment I swayed, my head once again spinning like it had a few moments earlier, as I tried to get used to being vertical again. The man steadied me with both his hands against my shoulders.
I blinked, trying to get my bearings, now that the world had righted itself. I found myself surrounded by a group of very attractive young women, all wearing beautiful flowing satiny gowns of various colors and styles that accentuated their slim but curvy bodies.
They all had lovely shiny hair, styled into various dos, and exquisite faces, not a single blemish marring their smooth skin. They represented a mixture of races. There was an Asiatic girl with shiny black hair all the way to her backside, a gorgeous African chick built like a sprinter, a sultry Latino or S
outh American, and several fair skinned lasses from Celtic or Aryan backgrounds. I counted seven in total.
What on earth must they be thinking about me, a fat middle-aged frump in their midst? I wondered, as my gaze drifted further afield.
Across a wide expanse of tiles, I saw what looked like a loading dock leading to… what could only be described as a space ship.
Hey prof, I hope you’re recording this, because you would absolutely adore this machine, I thought. It was as tall as a skyscraper, with giant thrusters that would put any twenty-first century rocket to shame. It gleamed golden under the midday sun, as it awaited a variety of goods that were being loaded into the enormous maw of its cargo bay. I blinked, realizing that the crew doing to loading weren’t people, but robots. They had Humanoid torsos and large tank-treads to help them move around. They looked they could carry at least a ton each, and several between two.
I turned in the other direction, and saw the outline of a massive city, not dissimilar to a twenty-first century, but breaktakingly clean, no grey pallor of pollution clinging to the skyline. The sky-scrapers gleamed in the sun, more glass than concrete, or whatever doubled as building material in this century.
It was obvious I was at an air-port, or should I say space-port, and judging by the luggage crowded around the group I was with, we were either boarding or departing from that incredible space craft.
“Are you all right now, Anita?” asked the attractive red-haired woman standing closest to me.
She had to be addressing me because she was looking right at me, but my name was Ruth not Anita. I even looked like a Ruth, stocky, sturdy, a keg on legs, for want of a better description, but for some reason this pretty young thing thought I was someone called Anita.
It was then that I realized I wasn’t meant to be experiencing the future, merely watching it. Heavens, had my brain only now caught up with me? Well, it certainly felt like I was smack bang in the middle of Professor Jackson’s sci-fi movie right now. I could feel the cool draft from standing in such a wide open expanse. I could even smell the other girls’ perfumes; a variety of floral scents accosting my sensitive nostrils all at once. And the middle-aged man still had one of his hands on my shoulder, since I could feel the pressure of it through my thin sleeve.
I glanced down at his fingers, and he quickly removed them. That was when I noticed that my arm was covered in blue satin, an arm that was slender, not one ounce of extra flesh on it whatsoever. I stretched it out in amazement. Where was the flabby wing I had started to develop? It looked… skinny! I continued to examine my body in complete and utter amazement, discovering that I was clad in blue satin from my shoulders to my shiny slippered feet. I hadn’t been able to cram my plump hooves into a pair of pointy shoes like this in years. Around my waist I wore a gold-linked belt, a waist so slender that I had to actually bend past my ample bust to see it!
Oh, if only this really is my body and not just Professor Jackson’s VR! I thought with sudden longing.
Automatically my hands went to my hair. I found numerous long tresses draping past my shoulders. I took hold of one, bringing it forward to reveal a beautiful lock of shiny blonde hair the color of sunflowers. I couldn’t believe my eyes; I’d never bothered to dye my mousy brown hair in the past. When you were as plain as me, not even a good haircut made much of a difference.
If my body was now as slim as it looked, my hair a gorgeous long mane of blonde waves, then I had to assume I had a face on a par with those of the pretty young women crowded around me.
I couldn’t help myself. I smiled. Thank you Professor Jackson. I think I’m really going to like this trip, for however long it might last. How it became so realistic I had no idea, but I suspected his tinkering with the machine must have sent everything into overdrive, sending my whole mind catapulting into future. I wondered what had happened to the poor woman I’d taken over. I hoped she was somewhere nice, not trapped in my old body, or even worse – dead!
“Okay, I think I might have hit my head a bit hard just then,” I said, still not accustomed to the sweet melodic sound of my new voice. “I’m still feeling… a little out of it. What were we doing?”
The girls started talking all at once, but the official-looking man held up a hand, calling for silence. “If you can’t remember that then maybe we should get you checked out for concussion. Does your head hurt?”
I turned it from side to side, watching more long golden waves of hair bob about my shoulders. I liked how full and bouncy they felt against my skin. “Er no, I’ve never felt better actually.” Which was the honest truth. In my old body I had started developing some aches and pains in my joints, no doubt from all the extra weight I’d started carrying around, but right now I felt like I could turn cartwheels, something I hadn’t been able to do since primary school.
“We were about to board the space transport to Terron, Anita. How could you possibly forget that?” asked my red-haired companion in amazement, her hazel eyes narrowing, and her pretty pink mouth puckering.
“Right Terron,” I said. Another planet I presumed. “Then what are we waiting for?”
“You’re cleared to board now, ladies,” announced an older woman as she hurried towards us. She too was wearing a satiny gown that reached her ankles, but her hair was swept back into a conservative bun, and she didn’t wear jewelry like the rest of the young women around me, just one gold cameo pin at the open vee of her dress. “Here are your passports back. Everything is in order.”
She began handing them out. I found a small rectangle in my hands that lit up like an i-phone when I pressed my thumbs against it. My alter-ego’s particulars appeared on the screen; a photo of an absolutely stunning young woman with huge blue eyes and a perfect cupid bow mouth. My jaw dropped in amazement, and again I wished that I really was her.
But there was a problem. The woman in the picture looked worried, the photographer having captured a very serious expression indeed. Beneath this was her name, Anita DeBurgh. Nice, I thought. Anita was twenty three, and a student of the University of Summerton, wherever that was. What Anita was studying wasn’t mentioned, but it seemed that she and her companions were off on an excursion of some sort.
“Grab your bags, and let’s go,” called the older woman. A mad scramble ensured as the girls reached for their cases. When only one remained, I assumed it was Anita’s, and went to grab the handle. It immediately stretched so that the large case could now trail behind me on some kind of air cushion, since I couldn’t see any wheels. The darn thing was a nauseatingly bright pink, which meant that Anita was probably a rather vain creature. Most of the other girls had more subdued luggage, if you could call floral patterns and bright tartan reds subdued.
I trailed after the group as they approached the massive spaceship. A moving walkway had been set up to take us up to the passenger deck, and we all stepped on it to ascend up the side of the vessel.
We arrived at a lounge area that could have belonged to a five star hotel. It was obvious that we were taking our trip through space in first class luxury. Porters appeared out of the woodwork (or was it triple-reinforced titanium?) to relieve us of our luggage.
Then we were ushered to our seats, huge soft armchairs that could be titled right back into beds. Other passengers were already seated; probably about a hundred other men, women and children. My eyes were drawn to a couple of exceptionally tall, well-built men with beautiful bronze-colored skin. They all wore their hair long and falling over their shoulders in soft waves. None of them had the same color. As one of them glanced in our direction, I couldn’t help staring, since I’d never seen a man quite so handsome in my life. He looked like he drank steroid milkshakes for breakfast; he had shoulders any footballer would be proud of. As for his face, it looked as though a sculptor had styled it, all sharp planes and angles and smoldering, deep set eyes. The only soft thing about him, it seemed, was his shiny black hair, falling in rippling waves down his broad back.
“Anita,” urged one of
my traveling companions. I realized I had fallen behind. I quickened my pace and took the seat indicated by the red-haired woman. “You mustn’t stare at them. They really don’t like it,” she hissed at me.
“Well, he was looking at us,” I pointed out.
“Heaven forbid if one of us ends up mated before we even leave Earth,” muttered one of the other girls. It was the Asian woman. “I wonder what they’re doing on Earth anyway, since they seem to hate coming here so much.”
“Settle down girls,” our matronly traveling companion said. “Have you all got your itineraries handy?”
“Yes, Miss Jackson,” chorused a series of voices. I wondered if she was some long distant descendant of the prof. That would mean Jackson had married at some stage. The thought made me cringe. When would he have time to find a wife if he didn't even seem to have time to wash?
“Oh, I’ve got yours here,” Miss Redhead handed me something that resembled an I-pad. “You dropped it when you fainted.”
I accepted it with thanks and placed it in my lap.
“While we’re in flight I want you all to read through it one more time,” Miss Jackson announced. “I want you to view this as a holiday, since most of you will return to resume your studies at the end of the tour. I know none of you want to go. No one ever does, but there are some beautiful sights on Terron. I am going to set an essay on Terron culture once we return.”
Groans ensued all round.
“Not that part of the culture, more to do with the planet’s history. Once you return you will never need to concern yourselves with that rather unpleasant aspect of life ever again.”
This time there were sniggers. “Only by those who have never had a boyfriend,” Miss Redhead whispered to the Asian girl behind her hand.
“There is a huge different between an Earth boyfriend and being forced to mate with a Terron male,” one of the other blonde woman muttered disdainfully. “I know I’d be really upset if I lose one of you.” She gazed rather meaningfully at the girls seated around her.
I was starting to get a really bad feeling about this, and hoped I’d get the i-pad thingy to work so I could find out what on earth they were all talking about. If my assumption was correct we were all heading off to visit some distant planet on which lived a race of alien males these girls didn’t like, but for some reason had to face in case one was chosen to ‘mate’ with them. I thought I was in the future. Didn’t mating only apply to animals or perhaps cavemen?
“Mrs Arden’s group got lucky,’ Miss Jackson reminded us.
“But two girls were taken from Dawn Avery’s, and three more disappeared from the La Trobe Institute,” the Asian girl piped up again.
Just then a computer announced for everyone to fasten their seatbelts in preparation for takeoff. I looked around behind me, and found a small metal latch attached to the back of the seat. I leant over and watched Miss Redhead pull the one on her seat so that it stretched and went around her lap to attach itself to another part of the seat.
Neat, I thought and did the same. Once everyone was sitting comfortably, I heard a loud rumble beneath our feet as the thrusters started up. The rumbling grew louder and louder until we couldn’t hear each other talk. I remembered movies about astronauts, and how during takeoff the G-forces had almost knocked them unconscious. I hoped this ship had some inertial dampeners or something, otherwise I’d probably end up a pancake.
Suddenly our seats bent backwards on some sort of hydraulic system so that we faced the ceiling. The pressure of take-off was phenomenal. I was pressed back so hard in my seat I thought I’d end up passing right through it. But whatever the armchair had been made from absorbed the pressure, shifting around me to cushion me. I managed to hold onto consciousness.
The roaring, rumbling and juddering didn’t last long, and I finally dared open my eyes to look around. Through the side windows I saw the sky darkening as we left Earth’s atmosphere.
Hey Dad, I’m doing it. I’m flying into outer space. Emotion rose in my throat as I thought of my father. How I wished he was here with me. He would have been over the moon, literally.
After a few more minutes the sky turned completely black, and I saw stars begin to speckle the darkness surrounding us.
“Time to initiate the infinity squared sequence. Please brace yourselves,” the computerized voice over the loud-speaker warned.
Infinity squared? I wondered. What on Earth’s that? How can you square infinity? That would just be infinity again! It was probably a simple, easy-to-remember sequence for something really complicated.
No amount of bracing prepared me for the next lurch the spaceship took. If it hadn’t been for the seatbelt I would have ended up plastered to the ceiling for sure.
Then suddenly everything went completely still. It felt very much like the ship had just stopped in mid-air.
“You may unfasten your seatbelts and move about the cabin. Refreshments will be served shortly,” the computer declared.
I heard the click-clack of seatbelts being released, but couldn’t figure out how to undo mine. Once again Miss Redhead came to the rescue. “I can see you’ve never gone off-world before,” she told me as she pressed her index finger against some sort of pressure-sensor on the metal catch.
“Thanks,” I murmured. I got up from my seat, expecting to float away in zero gravity. But my feet remained firmly on the ground. Artificial gravity, I realized. I bounced up and down a few times, testing it out. It appeared to be just like Earth’s. I felt somewhat disappointed. I would really have liked to float around like an astronaut.
True to the computer’s announcement, the porters, now waiters, began to move amongst the passengers with trays laden with food and drinks. I thought we were going to receive food in tubes or sticks, or at best dried ration cakes, but I could see normal beverages and canapés. Only these were actually five star cocktails of numerous colors, smoked salmon, caviar, brushettas, prawns and other delicious treats.
When I helped myself to one of each, Miss Redhead slapped my hand away. “Do you want to put on weight?” she admonished.
I stared at her in amazement. “I would have thought by now they would have invented something to keep it off!” I growled, and crammed the tart I had managed to score into my mouth before she could snatch it off me.
“We all wish that!” She settled back into her seat, and I returned to mine. “Better start on these notes before Miss Jack-boots comes over here.”
I had to giggle at her analogy. Obviously people of the future still remembered some of the old phrases, and how to crack a joke. We all still spoke with the Australian accent I’d grown accustomed to, so I assumed the shining city we’d just left had been Sydney, since that was where I’d gone for the experiment. Had the spaceport been built on the site of Sir Kingsford Smith Airport? I wondered how the locals handled the noise from spaceships rather than airplanes. But perhaps they now had perfectly sound-proofed homes.
Turning my attention to my own tablet, I stared at its blank screen, feeling around the sides for an ‘on’ switch. I soon learnt that it was tuned to the owner’s mind waves, because my questing mind soon caused a whole manner of images and snippets of text to come on display in front of me.
Since I had been thinking about Earth’s history over the past three hundred years, the device presented me with a brief rundown.
Before I knew it I was so engrossed I forgot that I was on a spaceship headed to another planet.
The nuclear wars some of the other participants had glimpsed through the Prof’s rose colored goggles never happened. Something even worse had. Slowly but surely we had been killing the planet with our greenhouse gasses. The carbon trading introduced in the early years of the twenty-first century had failed miserably to stem global warming as business fat-cats continued to pollute and waste natural resources.
Year by year the Earth heated up, and island nations disappeared beneath the rising oceans, never to be seen again. People died in massive floors,
cyclones, devastating snowstorms, and droughts that lasted decades.
But this didn’t stop the wealthier nations from continuing with their expensive space exploration projects. Telling the poorer nations still in existence that it was to search for a solution didn’t go down too well, and for many years wars continued to rage between the Middle East and the West, particularly the US.
However their questing finally paid off. Scientists from my own nation, Australia, discovered the wormhole in 2200.
I had to stop and wait for my head to stop spinning. Wormhole! Now I knew I was in the future! Wormholes had been speculated about for years, but this was the first one to be discovered, only a few million kilometers from Earth. It was stable enough for exploratory robot probes to be sent through, and one was intercepted by the Terrons. They sent us instructions on how to meet them, and the first Humans travelled through the wormhole to the other side of the Galaxy.
Even though the Terron race was dying from major fertility issues, they had the technology to help Earth. They had also invented the infinity squared system, which enabled us to navigate through what we soon discovered was a whole network of wormholes. Without it, we would have quickly become lost in the tangled web of conduits that ran through the universe.
The Terrons also possessed fuel that wouldn’t pollute the atmosphere, found in three-metre tall plants that had once been considered weeds on their planet. Once the Earthlings discovered that oil could be refined from the stems and leaves of these large sunflower like plants, it could be used safely as fuel on Earth, so they encouraged the Terrons to begin farming them, since they refused to grow on Earth, our soil and atmosphere not compatible, no matter how much our scientists tried to recreate its unique properties.
But so far the only beings benefiting from this chance intergalactic meeting were the Earthlings, until the day a half-caste child was born of the two races, the first child planet Terron claimed to have seen in a decade. Unfortunately the mother died in childbirth, something that had not been heard of on Earth for hundreds of years. They soon discovered her death had occurred because the fetus had grown too quickly, and then born too suddenly and violently.
However the child emerged healthy and hale, and the the Terrons realized that their race need not die out after all. They requested a deal with Earth that they explore the matter further. Surely there must be a way for babies to be born without the mother having to die.
But by then the news was already out. No woman was prepared to take the risk.
The Terrons threatened to halt all oil shipments to Earth. Earth’s entire infrastructures would collapse within weeks, since Earth no longer had an acceptable back up power source.
Earth had been backed into a corner.
And so the Treaty of 2212 was drawn up. All women of child-bearing age had to take a tour of duty to Terron. It sent fear into the hearts of them all, since it meant that the only way they could ever bear a half-caste child was to undergo a C-Section that had to be done at precisely the right time. Too soon and the baby was too young to survive, too late and the mother would die.
It was a precarious situation, since many lives were lost, and so few Earth women were actually compatible with Terron men. It heightened tensions between the two planets that would probably take years to overcome.
“Please fasten your seatbelts,” the computer broke into my perusal. “We are about to exit infinity squared and enter the orbit of Terron’s atmosphere.”
Since I would not be able to hold onto the tablet while we shuddered our way out of infinity, I stuck it behind my back and braced myself for our arrival.
As I was forced back into my seat, it dawned on me that Anita and her classmates were part of the next consignment of brood mares, and the incredible hunks at the other end of the passenger deck were Terrron men.