S Morden - One Way

He pushed the door shut with his foot, and the moment it had closed, the car just reversed back up the road before executing a turn. As if it was afraid. The tail lights receded, and the headlights soon faded. They were left alone with the wire gate that rattled, singing and shivering in the desert breeze. A camera mounted on top of a pole, halfway across no-man’s-land, angled up, and whirred.

The first gate clacked and drew aside.

The man walked forward, and Frank trailed after him, looking backwards, clutching his box tight against his tightening chest. The gate behind them closed before the second gate opened in front. The wirework rattled.

This hadn’t been what he’d expected when he’d left Cali. Not welcomed with open arms, maybe. But not this. He’d been… he didn’t even know what the word was that described what had happened to him. Kidnapped didn’t cover it. Disappeared didn’t either.

Another vehicle was coming down the road, from the inside, to collect them. Dust rose from the tires and hung out the back like a silver cloud. It pulled up, and he was goaded in. They were driven away, further in, deeper and down.

Enslaved. That was it. He was their slave. They owned him, body and soul.

Frank clutched his small box of belongings. In the distance was the bright airglow of floodlights, growing closer.

[NASA briefing to Xenosystems Operations 2/23/2035: NASA Headquarters Room D64, Washington, DC. In the public domain.]

1. Facility located in environmentally and geologically stable region.

2. Facility located in resource-rich location.

3. Facility in well-mapped location.

4. Facility in area of diverse morphological and geological features.

5. Facility must be self-sustaining.

6. Initial facility must be expandable to include workshop facilities, manufacturing and fabrication using local materials.

Frank was getting used to the taste of acid bile in his mouth, the burning in his chest and the deeper agony of feeling like he was running on knives. He was even beginning to enjoy it, after years of being numb. It was sharp and hard and relentless, a world away from the stultifying atmosphere of prison.

Even the air was different: it was needle-thin and austere, and it hurt to haul it in by the lungful. He’d never been a runner. He’d always thought himself too big and too heavy for that. What he thought, what he wanted, was no longer a consideration. He did as he was told, and right now he was being told to run up a big-ass mountain, as fast as he could. He could run down it again at a slower pace, but up was for speed-work, and his achievement was marked in splashes of vomit by the side of the trail.

He was unfit. He was a fifty-one-year-old man who’d done pretty much nothing for eight years, and eaten some pretty crappy food while doing it. Just how unfit came as a surprise: as it did, he supposed, to most.

The implant they’d inserted under the skin over his sternum talked to a computer, while the earpiece he wore told him to run to the limit of his ability. They—the medical team—wanted to know those limits. They wanted to push him right to the edge, without killing him. And sometimes, times like now, he wondered if they’d really mind if his heart burst and he dropped down right there, down among the mine tailings. For a bunch of doctors, they didn’t seem to care that much about his physical well-being, more about how best to manipulate him, puppet-like, to get more work from him.

The sky above was a deep dark blue, fading to a pale ribbon round the horizon, where the land was gray and rough-edged. His feet, encased in some surprisingly light running shoes, seemed to move of their own volition up the dusty path. A beep coincided with every second footfall, and he unconsciously fell into that rhythm. It was faster than he wanted to go, and with his position tracked by GPS, it wasn’t just his pace he needed to watch, but also his stride length. A certain speed was required. Every stride was a stretch.

He climbed. His toes dug in to the cushioning, as if trying to grip the cinder-rock trail. Sweat washed down his face, into his eyes, making them sting, into the corners of his mouth, where he tasted salt. His breathing was one-in, one-out, a pant, timed to his cadence, but never quite enough.

His calves ached like they were being flayed. And still he ran.

He ran to avoid the Hole. He ran because Mars was just over the next hill. If he could just get off the planet, then it’d be OK. He wasn’t going to crap out. He wasn’t going to fail. He’d run up and down the mountain. He’d show them what he was made of. He wasn’t going to be broken.

There came a point where all of those thoughts just faded into the background. All that was left was the road to the top, and him. It was pure and clean, and also terrible in its purity and cleanliness. Nothing existed but pain and path. The beeps were just noise, the voices in his head just static. One hundred yards. Fifty. Ten. Five. One.

He stopped, loose-limbed, leaning over. He spat on the ground. Hardly anything came out, he was so parched. He put his hands on his knees and watched the sweat drip down his nose and onto the ground. The beeping had stopped. He coughed and spat, used his already damp shirt to wipe his face, and hauled air, in a controlled, deliberate way that stopped him from hyperventilating.

He had an uninterrupted view to the east, over the salt pan in the valley and into the far distance. There was no habitation visible, and the only indications that people existed there were the contrails of planes far above him. Even the double line of fencing was invisible to his fatigue-etched sight. He was alone.

He straightened up, his hands on his hips, and lifted his chin towards the sun. There was heat in it, despite the chill wind. He had tried to forget. But the moment had gone. He’d dragged all his problems up the mountain with him, and now he had to drag them all back down.

The beep started again, and he knew better than to ignore it. The Hole beckoned. He dreamed of it most nights. The door locking behind him. The close silence. The four windowless walls.

He turned around and pointed himself down the track. Trying to get his legs to work again, trying to remember how to breathe. Beep. Beep.

Going down was a different discipline to up. He had to use his heels on the loose-surfaced path. Too fast, and he’d career head-first down across the rocky slopes, certainly injuring himself, possibly killing himself, but crapping out one way or another. Too slow, and he’d be made to do it again. And he didn’t want that either.

He ran, each foot-strike jarring his toes against the front of his trainers. Several of his toenails had already turned black. One had bled so profusely he’d had to soak the sock off, and the nail had come with it. The medical team hadn’t cared. Just as long as he could carry on with the battery of tests and exercises they threw at him.

He hadn’t met any of the other astronauts yet, so he had no way of comparing experiences. He had to assume there were others. There was no good reason for him to be first and only. They’d promised him a team. All it meant was that they were keeping them separate, for whatever purpose, and they’d bring them together at some point. Perhaps it was just until they’d completed their medical tests—no point in integrating someone into a group only for them to crap out on health grounds.

And maybe there were more than seven of them. Maybe they were competing against each other, unseen, as to who filled the crew slots. Those that didn’t make it would end up in the Hole. That wasn’t a happy thought. He was a middle-aged man, up against potentially younger and fitter specimens from Panopticon’s jails. He could lose out through no fault of his own.