Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘Let’s meet my friends!’ cooed the Sunflower.

Our teachers and caretakers for the next four years were waiting for us in the middle of the sports field – standing or hovering. They came forwards, pleased to see us.

Like the Sunflower, they were designed to appeal to children, and they mostly looked like huge toys. There was a Cat and a Star and a Flamingo and a Goldfish. The older kids just had a plain hovering globe thing like a slightly less aggressive version of the Colonel’s Goads. But I think something had gone wrong with the design for the robot for the smallest kids, or maybe it had got a bit broken on the way to Mars. It was a six-foot-tall Teddy Bear that lumbered forwards and said, ‘HELLO LITTLE CHILDREN’ in a deep and awful voice and four seven-year-olds burst into tears on the spot.

Little Noel Dalisay didn’t cry, because he was too busy looking around for his brother.

‘They’ve forgotten Carl!’ I said to Josephine.

‘Huh,’ snorted Josephine bitterly. ‘Tragic.’ She’d only had her tablet and its library of books back for a couple of hours, so wasn’t in any mood to be forgiving.

The robots seemed to know exactly who we all were, and more importantly how old we all were. They roamed about, looking at our faces and calling out names, until for the first time we were divided up by age rather than by nationality or by whoever we felt like hanging around with. Josephine and I and the rest of the eleven- and twelve-year-olds got the Goldfish.

‘Hey, kids!’ it said to us. It had a livelier, jauntier way of talking than the Sunflower, which sounded permanently spaced out on the bliss of being a flower-shaped robot. ‘I can’t wait for us all to get to know each other and start learning and having fun! Gosh, it’s gonna be super.’

‘Um,’ I began. It felt weird to be talking to a fish. ‘I think Carl Dalisay should be in our year? And he’s still on the ship.’

‘Aww, don’t you worry, Alice!’ it said fondly, as if it had known me for ages. ‘We’ll find him!’

The Goldfish was a rather fascinating thing. It was orange and shiny and faintly translucent with a light inside that slowly pulsed from dim to bright, and big, glowing blue eyes. When it was talking English it had an American accent, and like the Goads and the Sunflower, it hovered above the ground. I thought it was programmed a bit too young for us, though. It hadn’t been talking for two minutes before it became clear it was very keen on sharing and everyone using their imaginations.

‘At some point,’ I whispered to Josephine, ‘that fish is going to make us sing.’

‘Well, I just bet you all want to know where you’re going to sleep, and what your new uniforms look like!’ chirped the Goldfish, as cheerfully as it said everything else. ‘Let’s go, kids!’

It led us off across the sports field, down a path through more banks of plants and to the edge of the dome, where we found there were classrooms and corridors looped all around the central garden in rings. We got occasional glimpses of smaller domes outside, clustered round the main one like little bubbles in bathwater clinging to a big one.

‘That’s where they’re growing wheat and soy!’ the Goldfish told us happily. ‘In here for Assessment and Processing, kids!’

I was a little scared of being Assessed and Processed, but it herded us into a wide, bright chamber full of little cubicles where you got blasted with an unexpected sonic shower and the floor weighed you and something in the walls scanned you to measure how tall you were, and I think maybe it was checking to see if you had any diseases too.

‘Hey,’ said somebody, while things whirred busily behind the walls. I turned. Lilly was in the cubicle with me.

‘Hello,’ I said, not too warmly.

But Lilly was smiling at me – a humble, earnest sort of smile, like I was a duchess and she was interviewing for a job as my butler. ‘I like the pink in your hair, I never said. I’d never dare to do that, but it looks awesome.’

I blinked. ‘Thank you.’

‘I think your mom’s totally amazing, by the way.’

‘Mmm-hm.’

Lilly stopped smiling and twisted her hands. ‘Look, I’m sorry about before, with the exam girl. We were all just joking around, and you know, I guess she can’t help it but she does come off as kind of strange, and maybe we got a little carried away.’

I looked at her. Up till then, Lilly-and-Gavin-and-Christa-and-various-hangers-on had all been one blob of unpleasantness to me. But on her own, Lilly was very harmless-looking. She was about my height, slim, dark-blonde hair, pretty but not so you’d notice the first time you looked. Her shoulders were tense and her fingernails were bitten down to the quick.

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what to think.

‘Christa’s actually really cool,’ added Lilly. ‘And I’m sure she wasn’t trying to be mean either. And I was so scared, those first few days on the spaceship. And she’s, like, used to people who are celebrities and stuff, and it was so nice of her to hang out with us. So, you know.’

‘…So, you were trying to impress Christa,’ I summarised.

‘I don’t know.’ Lilly looked harassed, and I wondered if I was being too hard on her. She’d just said she was scared, after all. ‘I wasn’t trying to do anything , I just… I really miss home and is it that big of a deal? Can we be cool?’

I considered this as two tightly folded uniforms came plonking out of a hole on to a shelf, like a packet of crisps out of a vending machine.

‘Well,’ I said cautiously. ‘We don’t need not to be. But it’s not me you should be apologising to. It wasn’t me you were picking on.’

She flinched a bit at me calling it that, but she said, ‘Oh, OK, I totally will.’

And I think, at the time, despite everything that happened later, she probably meant to.

Once everyone in our class had uniforms, we went off to the dorms to change. Girls and boys were divided up, and there were six of us to a room. Josephine and I stuck grimly to each other during this bit, because under these circumstances it seemed like a good idea to hang on to people and things that you know you like, or at least can put up with.

Our dorm on Vogel Corridor was obviously a lot more modern than what I was used to at Muckling Abbot, but really the general idea – a bed and a chest of drawers and a little pinboard to put posters on – is much the same whatever planet you’re on. The ceilings were very high, though, because in this gravity a decent jump would probably have brained you otherwise. The uniforms were at least slightly better than the sludge-green ones at Muckling Abbot, and they were the same for boys and girls. There were ordinary white T-shirts to wear next to your skin, but the jackets and trousers were black and glossy on the outside, with a weird smooth texture like flexible glass, and a kind of soft webbing inside that could adjust to the warmth inside the dome as well as the cold, thin Martian air, so you were never uncomfortable. Of course they had that comet crest on the left side of the chest, and the EDF motto, which was ‘RECLAIMING EARTH’.

Josephine had got the machines to give her a toothbrush and some things for her hair. She was pretty glad to change out of the clothes she’d been wearing all week, and she said she liked wearing black. But she didn’t like having to do her hair, which was very tangly now, because other than run her fingers through it and bundle it up in her scarf, she hadn’t done anything to it for the whole voyage. She sat on her new bed next to mine and began morosely trying to comb it. I tried to help but we weren’t getting anywhere, and then fortunately some older girls from next door wandered through and one of them was called Chinenye and she was from Nigeria and had similar-ish hair and a usefully bossy temperament. She took over.