Atlas Alone Page 3

  This ship is similar in size to the original Empire State Building, protects what is literally the last group of human beings that will ever leave Earth and is more technically complex than anything the US gov-corp has ever built. Simply the Rapture itself was a remarkable feat; being able to build over a hundred spacecraft in secret, recruit all the people for the project and send them all up into orbit around the moon on the same day was incredible. And no one knew about it until they saw our vapor trails. At least, no one who lived long enough to blow it all open. And then there’s the fact that they built Atlas 2 on the dark side of the moon without anyone knowing. That’s . . . insane. The number of satellites they must have either shut down or hacked to hide it beggars belief. After achieving all that and getting the ship under way without a single accident, they weren’t going to just leave us all to our own devices for twenty years. Surely there is a command structure of some sort, whether it’s based on a naval carrier military structure or the usual corporate hierarchy—how could a ship of this size be flown to another planet without one? Which raises the question, why isn’t that command crew public knowledge?

  I’d ask Travis, but he just made it perfectly clear that he is happy to just ignore everything difficult for the rest of the trip. Carl is too unstable to talk to about this, and besides, his status is just as dubious as mine. For a while I thought I was hitting a brick wall whenever I tried to find information on how Atlas 2’s social structures work because, like Carl, I’m an ex-asset. Both of us arrived on this ship still wearing the security bangle designed to keep us off the Internet entirely. It was only after we complained a week into the trip that they removed them. Then there was some debate over whether I had the correct clearance on Atlas 2’s servers. I wasn’t known by the Circle—even though I came aboard with that weird group of scientists masquerading as a cult—so I hadn’t got anything except swift, last-minute permission to come on the ship from the US gov-corp and was effectively an unknown quantity. I still have the feeling that if it had been several months until Rapture, instead of only days, Carl and I wouldn’t have got our places here at all. They would have had the time and resources available to kill him and keep the secret of Rapture safe without his father’s knowledge.

  Cheery thought.

  I sigh. Even now, several months into the trip and with the same security clearance as the average Circle member, I still can’t get a sense of my place here. If I could lose myself in mersives like I used to, it wouldn’t bother me. But I’m aimless, drifting, trying to find a way to fill all this unstructured time I used to crave having. Any queries regarding contacting anyone related to command simply result in the ship AI directing me to Carl’s father, the de facto leader of the Circle. Any attempts to find other passengers online are quickly shut down by the AI, citing strict privacy rules. There’s no crew or passenger manifest that I can find online, and even the booking system for the rare public spaces on the ship isn’t designed in such a way that allows me to see who else has booked individual slots; they’re just listed as “unavailable.”

  If I hadn’t seen the other shuttles on the way up to the ship, I’d have suspected that the Circle was the only group on board. But I also saw the size of Atlas 2 and there’s no way any gov-corp would have built something on this scale if it wasn’t meant to be packed full of people.

  But it isn’t just a desire to find some way to understand life on board. Like Carl, I want to know who was responsible for what we saw happen to Earth. Unlike him, I don’t feel any desire to press for prosecution; I lost faith in any sort of gov-corp justice many years ago. I just want to know, to have someone I can focus all this nebulous, miserable pain on. Someone I can point to in my head and say, “It was your fault.” Not having that is surprisingly hard to cope with.

  Without the names of the people in charge, I’m stuck. They are the most likely to have given the order to start that nuclear war, or at least to know who did. Though with the way information is locked down on this ship, I’m not sure how far I’ll get without better access privileges.

  It would be easier if the ship was organized differently, but it’s been designed to keep people in the groups they arrived in without any opportunities to mix with anyone else. Carl’s father, Mr. Moreno, said that it’s to keep the social focus around established communities, to keep a sense of continuity from Earth, throughout the journey, to the destination. I wish I could agree with him. It seems that whoever runs this ship wants to keep us all apart from one another. Considering we’re going to be arriving at the same planet and that we’re all, hopefully, making a new life there, this seems spectacularly shortsighted.

  Perhaps there is something to be said for the approach if you are actually properly part of one of those communities. But Carl and I aren’t. And he has the tie to his father to help him. I feel like the awkward ex-girlfriend dragged along to a family event, without the relationship part, thankfully. But it feels the same, everyone pegging me as the one Carl brought with him. They’re nice enough, but I haven’t clicked with any of them. I don’t expect to. Making proper friends is something other people do. At least I assume they do actually feel things for them, rather than just going through the social motions like I do. I have Carl, and he is what I’d call my friend, and then there is everyone else. Travis . . . Travis isn’t a friend, but he doesn’t exactly fit easily into the category of “everyone else” either. That shared experience only hours after we came aboard, the simple fact that we were together when we watched everything we had ever known being obliterated, binds us whether we want it to or not.

  Everyone else in the Circle has known one another for years, all working toward this trip. Even Travis seems comfortable with them, though he was only with them a little while. And there’s something about Travis I don’t trust. I’m not sure of the deal he cut to get into the Circle, but seeing as he was once married to the notoriously shady Stefan Gabor of GaborCorp fame, there must be something dodgy involved.

  I sigh, knowing I can’t just lie here feeling miserable. I have to take care of the meat that carries my brain around. It’s not just for my own self-care, however; it’s a stipulation of the contract I signed to come aboard. There’s an entire page of health commitments that I’ve promised to adhere to, and I signed it without any bitterness whatsoever, unlike the last contract I signed that had dictated how I cared for my body. Back then it was because I was expected to put in the requisite care of a corporate asset. Now it’s simple common sense. No one wants the ship’s complement to arrive on the new planet and be too weak and unfit to cope.

  I’ll be sixty-three when we arrive. There was a time when that sounded so old to me, but now? Now one’s sixties are seen as a halfway point. Maybe a third, if you’re superrich and can afford all the replacements and maintenance. Travis’s ex-husband famously boasted that he would live to see three hundred. I remember commissioning mersives about the tech being developed to achieve that. There are rumors that the knowledge the Pathfinder left behind includes life-extending technology. I’ll believe it when I see my two hundredth birthday.

  Right now, my forty-three-year-old body needs some damn exercise. I open the one storage cupboard I have, containing the only pair of shoes I own other than the soft slip-ons I’m wearing now: running shoes. There are two shallow drawers, containing the bare essentials for daily life and the only necklace I own. I haven’t worn it for over thirty years. Above the drawers are two shelves upon which rest all the clothes I own save the joggers, T-shirt and sweatshirt I’m wearing. There’s another set, exactly the same as these, in there, plus pajamas I have no intention of ever wearing and an extra blanket. It’s taken me all of these six months to stop viewing them as prison garb. They were waiting for me, packaged in bioplastic when I arrived, just like the toothbrush and everything else in the bathroom. It makes sense that they mass-produced them on that lunar base for use on the ship. We weren’t allowed to bring any clothes other than the ones
we wore on the day of Rapture. Every kilogram of weight that wasn’t part of our bodies had to be strictly accounted for. It doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would.

  Just as I’m lacing my shoes there’s a knock on the door and I freeze. Has Travis come looking for reconciliation already? “Who is it?” I whisper to my APA.

  “Gabriel Moreno,” Ada’s voice “whispers” back to me.

  “Come in,” I call, and Carl’s father enters.

  He’s the kind of man my old manager would have called a silver fox; old enough to be distinguished and respected, blessed with a full head of white hair, and still attractive. The resemblance between him and his son is obvious enough; the same big brown eyes and Spanish set to his jawline.

  His smile is brief and he slides the door shut behind him to stand just inside the room, clearly not wanting to invade the tiny space too much. “Hi,” he says, gaze dropping to my running shoes. “I won’t keep you long.” There is only the slightest hint of a Spanish accent in his voice now.

  I smooth the Velcro closure of the left shoe and stand. Just as I’m about to say something, I close my mouth again. Thinking that he’s here to ask what is wrong with his son is childish speculation. We’re all adults here and I am not his son’s keeper.

  “Take a seat,” I say instead, waving a hand at the bed in the absence of a chair.

  He perches on the edge of it. We’re all getting used to this now, most of us adopting that slightly uncomfortable position to show that we’re aware we’re in someone else’s sleeping space. I sit on my pillow, leaving as much of the length of the bed between us as possible.

  “I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had with Carl a couple of days ago,” he begins. Something about the way he is looking at me, slightly nervous, makes me wonder what the hell Carl has been saying about me. “And . . . and he said that he felt that you need a purpose here.”

  I fold my arms. “Oh, he did, did he?” I try to hide my irritation behind a veneer of wry amusement. I can’t believe Carl would say that. But I can believe his father would have interpreted some vague concern he may have expressed about his friend and translated it into this. Carl and I understand each other. We don’t tell other people about what we need. His dad is just really bad at trying to find an excuse to “help” me.

  I doubt this is going to turn into anything interesting anyway; I can’t see how any of my former skills could be put to use. There’s no entertainment network on the ship producing new content—at least, as far as I’m aware—so I can’t commission new material as I used to on Earth. Sure, I have transferable skills, no doubt. But with no idea what most people do with their time on board, that’s just an assumption.

  Not that I want to be plugged back into some corporate hierarchy. Maybe I should shut this down before it goes too far. I hated my old job. I never chose to do it, in any sense, and I resented every moment of my life that it stole from me to pay the debt that had been forced upon me by the hot-housers.

  But if there’s a transferable skill I do have in spades, it’s keeping my thoughts to myself and hiding how I feel while I work out what the best possible outcomes are. If he does have an idea of how to give me something to do that can change my status here, maybe I can make some progress on finding the ones responsible for the war. I can’t find the information I need while stuck in the liminal space I occupy on the fringes of the Circle. If I can find a way to be useful to more people on this ship, I’m more likely to get better data access privileges.

  Of course, Gabriel has no idea what my true motivations are, so I fix a hopeful expression on my face, playing the part of someone who believes this kind, fatherly man has come to fix a little problem that his son kindly brought to his attention. “I must admit, I have been . . . finding it challenging to have so much time on my hands,” I say, choosing the words carefully. I don’t want to tell him how unfocused I’ve been, how despondent. And I want him to think I’m enthusiastic, but not too much. “It would be good to feel useful again.”

  “Oh, I understand. To be honest, I would be worried if you didn’t feel this way. I’m sure this is the reason Carl is struggling so much. But he won’t talk to me about it.”

  I see the opening, the hope in his eyes that I will give him enough information and insight into his son’s problems that he’ll be able to build a bridge with them. Carl rarely talks about his father and never about what happened between them in the past. At some point, the man sitting on my bed must have screwed up so catastrophically as a parent that his son fell into slavery. Is he even aware of that?

  I know his son far better than he does, and there is a value in knowing something another is desperate to understand. I pull the pillow out from under me, taking my time repositioning it against the wall to give me the chance to weigh up the transaction opportunity laid before me. Keeping this man on my side, making him believe he can trust me, will serve me well. Gabriel has the highest status of all the people I know here and most probably has access to all the information I need too.

  But I’m not willing to sell Carl’s trust in me. At least, not for something as minor as his father’s goodwill. That said, Gabriel’s seen how much weight he’s lost. That’s no secret.

  “Carl is in a really tough place right now,” I say. “I just don’t know how to help him, to be honest, and it’s so hard to see him suffering.”

  Gabriel nods, his shoulders slumping. “It is hard, yes. And even harder when you are the reason why he is the way he is.”

  “No!” I say, pretending to be aghast at the suggestion. “He’s a grown man and he has to find a way to move forward, regardless of what happened in his past. And it’s complicated with him. The food thing . . . I don’t know where that comes from. And you’re completely right; he has too much time on his hands. Carl has one of the keenest minds I know. I’ve seen the way he solves puzzles, how driven he was bringing people to justice. He’s floundering without that purpose in his life.”

  I don’t tell him the reason why he is that way. That his son was conditioned, sometimes violently, to be unable to leave a case unsolved. Even though he seems to feel culpable for his son’s problems, I don’t know if Gabriel is aware of the indenture we both suffered under. If he isn’t, and Carl realizes that I told his father, he’d never forgive me, just as I’d never forgive anyone who gave that away about my past without my permission.

  “He is very lucky to have such a good friend,” Gabriel says.

  “I just wish I could do more,” I say. Was that too much? No, he seems to have bought it.

  He clears his throat. “I haven’t managed to find anything for Carl yet, but I have found an opening for you. I asked around and had a chat with a few people about your skills. Told them you were keen to contribute. Americans like that.”

  Asked around? How did he do that? How did he chat with people who were presumably outside of the Circle? I’m desperate to ask, but I keep that desire in check, concentrating on channeling that hunger into the portrayal of an underemployed woman waiting for good news.

  “I can’t promise it will be as interesting as your last job,” he continues. “And of course, if it turns out to be something unsuitable, there’s no obligation to carry on . . .”

  “Mr. Moreno,” I say with a smile, “just having an opportunity is wonderful. What is it?”

  “Just analysis, to begin with, rather than anything creative.” He says it apologetically, but my breath catches with excitement. Analysis means data, and that’s the only thing I’m interested in. “They want a second opinion on mersive consumption trends from someone with experience.”

  “What’s the analysis for? Are they making anything new during the trip?”

  He shrugs. “I have no idea, sorry. If you’re interested, I’ll let them know and they’ll tell you more.”

  “I’m more than interested! I’m thrilled!” I don’t have to amp u
p the enthusiasm very much at all. Analysis of consumption trends inevitably means information on the people consuming the mersives. Even if it doesn’t lead me to my targets—and there’s every chance it could, depending on how they process the data—it will give me an insight into the other people on board. That’s something.

  He beams at my excitement and claps his hands. “¡Muy bueno! I’ll let them know.” He stands and I do too, shaking his offered hand with both of mine.

  “Was it hard to set up?” I ask. “It’s just that I’ve tried to find other people to talk to, just socially, and I’ve been getting nowhere.”

  “Social contact is deprioritized between groups, but this was different. Just a couple of chats, as I said, and then final sign-off before I could offer it.”

  Final sign-off. So there is a hierarchy. “Well, thank goodness for a chief media officer who’s willing to give an unknown like me a chance.” I bait the hook . . .

  And he bites: “Oh, there’s no CMO; it was Commander Brace who approved it.”

  “Well, thank goodness for her!” Another little conversational maggot goes on the hook.

  “Him,” he says, reaching for the little hollow handle in the door, ready to slide it across. He pauses. “You . . . you will tell me if there is anything I can do to help Carlos, won’t you?”

  I rest my hand on his shoulder. “Of course, Mr. Moreno.”

  “Gabriel,” he says, glancing at me over his shoulder. “Call me Gabriel, please.”

  “I’ll see you soon, Gabriel. And thanks again.”

  He slides the door open and I close it after he has left to rest my forehead against it, grinning into the plastic.