S Morden - One Way

“I ran a construction company,” said Frank. He tapped the big balloon wheel with the toe of his reinforced boot. “I hired people to do this for me.”

“Not any more. It’s me and you, now. Drive it out again, and I’ll set it back up.” Marcy picked up one of the cones and used her fist to take out some of the dings. “Now you know how difficult it is, you might just listen to me when I tell you how to do it.”

“I would have listened to you anyway.” Frank climbed up into the cab and swung himself into the seat. “I’m not going to be that guy, OK?”

Marcy dropped the cone back on the ground. It was more or less straight again. “In my experience, all the guys are that guy. Take it forward, thirty feet, and stop. We’ll keep doing it until you can slot it in blindfold. Then I get to make it difficult for you.”

He knew the basics. He could get it almost in the right place, almost every time. Almost, when he was a million miles away, wasn’t going to cut it. The cameras helped when he was some way away. Less so when he was closer, as the cones had the tendency to disappear from view at exactly the wrong moment. Sure, Marcy could spot for him, but there’d be times when he’d just have to do it on his own: him taking ten attempts to get something into place when one should have done was a sure-fire way of burning off the better part of a shift. And he’d be in a spacesuit.

So this wasn’t anything like the same conditions he’d be working under. But if he couldn’t get it right here and now, he wouldn’t be able to get it right then, when it mattered. A mistake could get them all killed, or stranded, or something else bad. He put his hand on the wheel and dabbed his finger on the gas pedal. Shouldn’t call it the gas pedal if there was no gas, or a pedal.

He drove it forward a couple of lengths, and let go. There was a brake, but he didn’t have to use it, because the motor provided enough resistance to bring the buggy to a stop.

He looked behind him at the space outlined by the cones. He imagined listening to the sound of his own breath loud in his ears, turning his head against the pull of a bulky, padded suit, inflated so that it was like wearing a tire. Marcy was right. He was going to have to be able to do this blind to stand any chance of doing this on Mars. He needed to look at the screens instead. Work out what he should be seeing if it was going right.

She climbed on up and hung off the back of his seat. “OK?”

He nodded.

“You look nervous.”

“There’s a lot riding on this.”

“This is practice, OK? Don’t you go freaking out on me. Slow. Dead slow. Barely moving slow. Faster you go, the less time you got to correct. Even if you got someone shouting at you, you play it cool, you keep it clean. They’re not driving. You are. You get to decide. If you’re not happy, you stop. This rig, this load, whatever it is, is your responsibility. It’s up to you to put it in the right place, not anyone else. You got that?”

“I got that.”

“You sure you got that? Because folk like us are used to following orders, and someone yelling at you to hurry it up, right in your ear, and you can’t turn them off, that’s somewhere between a distraction and a compulsion. You want to make them shut up. You want to show them you can do it faster. Don’t you?”

Frank took another look behind him, past Marcy, at the corral of cones. Then he looked up at her. “No. I do this at my own pace, or not at all.”

She punched her fist into his shoulder. “So let’s show these assholes some skills.”

Physical contact. It was a little more than he could cope with at that moment, and he had to take a breath. She didn’t seem to notice, which was just fine.

“OK,” he said. “Dead slow. Tell me what I’m supposed to be watching.”

There was a knack to it, a counter-intuitive way of turning the wheel and easing the gas that would put the back end right where it was needed. He wasn’t a master at it—Marcy didn’t take the controls once so as not to embarrass him—but with care, he became competent. He could throw the buggy around in loops and turns and still park it up in one maneuver.

By the time their earpieces told them to break it up, he was confident he could back the buggy up without driving through a building.

“I don’t know when the next time is,” said Marcy. “But when it is, we’ll do it with a trailer. That’s a thing.”

“A difficult thing?”

“Enough to make grown men weep.” She put her hand to her ear. “Acknowledged. Got to go.” She kicked at the ground, looked as if she was going to say something more, then decided against it. She glanced once at the buggy and its guard of orange cones, then walked away towards the buildings just down the slope.

Frank waited for his next instruction, which didn’t come. Marcy’s dusty tracks settled, and left him alone, standing in the dry, cold dirt. He looked up at the mountain, at the bright blue sky, at the expanse of glittering salt pan to the east and the next, distant ridge quivering in the haze. That was the free world.

He narrowed his eyes. He had a machine strong enough to break through the double fence and rugged enough to get him over the crystalline desert. And almost subconsciously he brushed his fingers against his sternum, where the scar had nearly healed and the hard lump of the implant lodged against his bone.

They weren’t stupid. Neither was he. The only way out was up.

“ Report to Building Two. Acknowledge .”

“Acknowledged.”

[Transcript of private phone call between (unidentified XO employee 1) and (unidentified XO employee 2) 4/2/2047 0935MT. Note: one side of conversation redacted.]

XO1: Meyer failed his medical. Something about a hormone imbalance.

XO2: …

XO1: Yeah, I get that.

XO2: …

XO1: Just send him straight to the Hole, no need for him to interact further with anyone else at Gold Hill. I’ll send some guys around to pick him up and take him to Pelican Bay.

XO2: …

XO1: No, they know better than to tell him. What’s he going to do anyway? The chimps don’t really exist, so if one goes missing, it’s no big deal. I’ll bump a replacement up and hope he doesn’t flunk it.

XO2: …

XO1: Sure, later.

[transcript ends]

In his never-ending stream of instructions, he didn’t think he’d ever had one for Building Five. Two, Four, Six, Three, and back again, sure. Five was new, and he wondered what they kept in there. Certainly, the foyer area appeared different—this was no suite of offices and conference rooms: it was clean, almost sterile, like a hospital ward, except that was more a Building Two thing.

White coats. He was in scientist country. Room Fourteen was somewhere on the ground floor, and he looked up at the signage to tell him which way to go. There were big double doors. He pressed his finger to the lock, and pushed with his other hand as the lock snicked back.

Bright. Very bright. There was something in the middle of the room that looked like a suspended, crucified, oversized mannequin which, on first sight, didn’t fill him with confidence. The detail of the rest of the room—straps and tubes and fixing points and harnesses and taps—made him stop, half in, half out the doorway.

His ear told him to strip. Slowly, shapes resolved in white, full clean-suits with head coverings and face masks. They were carrying bulky bags of equipment towards him. “ Strip ,” repeated the voice. “ Acknowledge .”

“Acknowledged.” The door clicked shut behind him and he shucked his clothes. He’d been through this drill often enough in the Blood Bank, and it wasn’t like cavity searches weren’t a thing in the penitentiary. What embarrassment or shame he’d felt had long since dissipated.