Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘Now, EDF cadets don’t use language like that, do they, Alice,’ the Goldfish scolded me, but it seemed too excitable to stick to the subject. ‘I sure am glad to see you, Alice!’ it rejoiced. ‘We have so much to catch up on! Say! What about those quadratic equations?’

‘Please,’ I groaned. ‘Please stop.’

I was lying on my back on a desk. I would have been staring hopelessly at the ceiling, but the Goldfish was bouncing about in the air above me and it shone algebra problems into my eyes whenever I opened them.

It was also singing.

‘Sing with me, Alice!’

It wasn’t the Goldfish’s fault that it was programmed to teach children the EEC standard syllabus, or that, in its robot-y way, it seemed to feel terrible whenever it couldn’t. On the whole I was glad it was there. For one thing, it glowed, and it would have been very dark in the classroom without it as someone had smashed the lights. And it took my mind slightly off how long it would take to die of hunger and thirst, and made me instead focus on just how well-educated a person could be before she died of hunger and thirst.

It was very annoying though.

‘Can’t you just try and get us out of here?’ I begged, picking idly at a plaster on my hand. The Goldfish had at least helped me find the first-aid kit. I had patched up my various injuries very thoroughly, because it was something to do and because the Goldfish didn’t try to teach me anything while I was doing it.

‘I already have, Alice,’ said the Goldfish sadly. ‘But hey! At least we’ve got plenty of time to learn ! Now, what do you think that x might be?’

‘Four,’ I said sulkily, screwing my eyes shut.

‘Aww, come on, Alice! I know you can do better than that.’

I sighed, and opened my eyes a crack. ‘Nine,’ I admitted.

‘Great work, Alice!’ the Goldfish cheered, and emitted a stream of sparkling stars over me like confetti. ‘So, let’s try another equation…’

‘Oh God, please,’ I said desperately. ‘Please, can’t we at least do something else? Can’t we do… biology? I like biology.’

The Goldfish seemed to hesitate. It tilted slightly in the air, as if it was putting its head on one side.

‘Biology?’ it repeated, almost warily, as if I might be playing a trick on it.

‘Yes,’ I begged. ‘What about… cells. You know, the difference between plant and animal cells, and, and DNA and everything. Because I think all that’s fantastic .’

The light behind the Goldfish’s eyes pulsed thoughtfully. ‘ Fine ,’ it said in a very grim voice for such a cheerful robot, and the glowing equations hanging in the air vanished and were replaced by friendly diagrams of eukaryotic cells.

I felt pathetically grateful. I really do like biology, even if it came fairly low down the list of things I wanted to be doing just then.

‘Can I go to sleep afterwards?’ I asked. ‘It’s ever so late.’

‘OK, Alice,’ said the Goldfish, sounding a little mournful, and I wondered if it was thinking about how neither biology nor quadratic equations was going to give us a better morning to wake up to.

‘And Goldfish,’ I said forlornly, ‘when we’ve done the parts of the cell, and if I really concentrate, could you maybe… tell me a story? Or even sing a song, so long as it’s not about algebra?’

The Goldfish came closer and I actually leaned my face against it. ‘Sure,’ it said gently.

Half an hour and plenty of organelles and cytoplasm later, I was curled up on the desk while the Goldfish glowed and sang softly in Mandarin.

This is going to be embarrassing if anyone finds out about it , I thought. But then I figured that if I was ever in a position where getting teased for asking a robot fish to sing me a lullaby was my most pressing problem, life would have improved immeasurably and I’d have no business complaining.

‘What does it mean, Goldfish?’ I murmured sleepily, hoping it wouldn’t see that as an opportunity to be educational.

The Goldfish obligingly projected subtitles into the air without stopping singing, and I was too tired to read them all the way through but it was something about the moon and a river and being a long way from home.

And so I fell asleep.

I don’t think I slept very long. It was just as dark and felt just as empty around the classroom when I opened my eyes, except that something was happening outside the door. The pole was scraping and creaking in the door frame and someone was grunting with the effort to pull it free.

Someone laid the pole quietly and carefully on the ground. I sat up.

Josephine stood in the doorway, her eyes wild under her pirate scarf. ‘Alice,’ she said. ‘Do you still have any objections to stealing a spaceship and getting the hell out of here?’

Later I couldn’t help but wonder if she might have practised saying that, but whether she had or not the effect was excellent, so all I said was, ‘None at all,’ and ran to join her, feeling I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life. I grabbed the first-aid kit on the way because I had the feeling that where we were going, we might need it.

The Goldfish came sailing after me into the corridor, just as glad as I was to be free.

‘Stop glowing, anyway,’ I hissed when it didn’t go away.

I don’t think the Goldfish was physically able to stop glowing altogether, but it did dim down until its eyes were hovering points of blue light in the dark.

‘How did you find me?’ I panted as we ran.

‘A kitchen robot saw it all happen,’ said Josephine. ‘Sorry it took me a while to get to you.’

‘But… what? The kitchen robots don’t even talk!’

‘No, but the Sunflower does,’ said Josephine. ‘It was shut in the laundry. I persuaded it to access all the visual records from the security cameras and the other working robots until it found you. It told me the code to get into the hangar, too.’

‘How?’ I asked. ‘Why should it do any of that?’

‘Because I had something it wanted.’ We’d reached the main entrance lobby. Josephine slammed her hand on to the sensor panel to open the doors. ‘I let it teach me Spanish for four hours.’ She looked at me and grinned. ‘ Hola .’

The night air was freezing by now, and as it hit me in the face so did the reality of what was happening. Oh God, I thought, she wants me to pilot a spaceship , in the dark , and fly off to find help that might well not exist thousands of miles away on Mars.

It felt even more real and even more alarming when I actually saw the spaceship – well, technically it was barely a spaceship: it was another Flying Fox, which was only designed to zoom around sub-atmo but could have probably got us to Phobos if we’d wanted. But what was worrying me was that Josephine had managed to pilot it out of the hangar herself, but had promptly veered off the runway and crashed it into the obstacle course. The Flying Fox seemed to be OK, though the monkey-bar course didn’t.

‘Wait,’ I said, swallowing a cold feeling in my throat. ‘What about – how are we actually going to do this? What about supplies?’

‘I’ve got everything we need!’ insisted Josephine, swinging her shoulder bag, full as I knew of duct tape, rocks and lately a stock of highlighter pens.