Chapter 1.3

Our life on the station… well… ship, settled into a routine. Marc adjusted the lighting to dim at night, so our circadian rhythms would be normal.  We opened the bay cargo doors, so more than one person could enter a bay at once.  These were motorized doors that slid open and closed like a pocket door.  They were airtight so the exterior bay doors could be opened.

So it was day after day of trying to survive, but things were getting better.  As things grew, we were able to replace our tattered clothing from plants. As well, as natural, some of our scientists, of which we had an abundance, were able to produce synthetic fibers.

Strangely, some junk had been placed in one of the storage bays. We had enough raw materials to make to make most of what we needed.  We had to determine that we would recycle everything. Not that we had any choice.  We had some reserve air, but we would not waste it by ejecting anything. Nor would we waste anything else.  We needed everything.

When we found the junk, it was as if the fittings of the station had been thrown in there after they had been removed from their original location.  The foremost thing on everyone’s mind was, why?  Why had Caesar not killed us outright?  Why did he give us what was needed to survive?  We had enough water to live indefinitely, as long as we recycled everything.  The same with food supplies.  Well, not indefinitely, but as long as we had power.

Why did he take our medical researchers?  Granted, the nanites did most of the work, but someone had to be able to service them.  

It was about a year into our voyage to nowhere that it happened.  We had started to feel that we were beyond Caesar’s reach.  We shouldn’t have been so stupid.

HELLO CHILDREN.  I’M BORED.  LET’S PLAY!

The voice that echoed through every inch of the station was recognizable. It was Caesar’s and it came from every speaker at decibel levels that deafened us... literally.  It took several hours for our nanites to make repairs, so for the next day, we did very little.  Several of our computer engineers started a review of the station’s systems, although the only way they could communicate was through paper, pen, and computer screens. The last was used sparingly, however; who knew what bots the systems contained that were intelligent and could read their messages?

When our hearing had fully returned, we were all on edge.  What would happen next?  Was the voice just some programming left by Caesar, or had one of our people put it there?  Had one of our people got bored and decided to have some… fun?

SO COMPLACENT!

The voice wasn’t as loud this time, which was just as well.  We needed as little damage as possible for what happened next.  Not that it was terrible in itself, but nerve-racking for us.

The lighting started to strobe, so fast that we appeared to be moving in stop motion.  It was eerie.

Dodson and his team tried to help the computer engineers from the mechanical side.  One of his men pulled a wall panel off and reached into the space to trace the wiring.  He was the first and last man to do that.

Somewhere, a bolt of energy found his body, and left him a smoking pile of charred flesh on the corridor floor.  Next, the flashing stopped. There was silence for a moment, but then the voice:

THAT IS NOT ALLOWED.

The cargo doors all slammed shut, leaving everyone inside the bays sealed away.  I wasn’t far from where the scientist had been killed, and I heard a scream, followed by another, then another.

The station was built like a two level pinwheel.  Tipped on its side.  It’s artificial gravity was set up so to get from one level to the other, you walked through a one hundred and eighty degree downhill slope.  There were twelve of these spaced around the center hub.

I was across the main corridor from one of these passageways and heard a scream filter from ‘downstairs’.  Several people were running to see what had happened on our level, and I headed to the other.  When I got there, I saw why the screams.  

A woman had been passing through the door when it slammed shut.  Normally, there were sensors that would not allow the doors to close when someone was in the way.  For some reason, this hadn’t happened this time.  Her body had been bisected, and the part that was on this side of the door was lying in a bloody mess on the corridor floor.  I knelt down and brushed a bit of blood off her face.  I had known her.  She was an artist and had helped several people make their apartments more homey.

I was fighting back the urge to vomit when we heard the external doors of one of the bays opening.  I was shaken, but I still had the presence of mind to jump up and run to where the sound seemed to be coming from.  It was hard to locate, because with the circular corridors around the hub, the sound came from both directions, and with nothing to muffle the sound, it echoed.

I found the correct bay, not so much by determining the direction, but by the crowd of people outside the door.  There, someone had been going through the door, or perhaps trying to hold the door open for someone.  The bisecting here was almost perfectly in the middle of the person’s body.  It was a man this time, and while I didn’t know him, a woman was weeping, being held by a friend.  I figured she had probably known the man, intimately.

While I had passed several doors, I had heard muffled hits from the other side.  This one was completely silent. I glanced over at the monitor that showed the pressurization of the bay.  It had been depressurized before it had been opened.  Now, it was pressurizing.  I wondered why the bay had been opened at all.  The complete depressurization of the bay would be enough to kill people.

A red light on the panel turned green, and all the locked doors opened. What we saw was horrifying.  Most people had hurried down to the locked door, and many had hammered on it with their fists.  There was a chill in the air, and not just from the cold of space.  I saw several people I recognized, and I looked at the bay number, in complete shock.  My own home was in this bay!  Had I been there, I would now be dead!

I stumbled into the bay, seeing friends whom I had worked with to make a halfway comfortable home over the last year.  At first, I didn’t know what to feel.  I was completely devastated, and furious all at once.  I realized there was nothing I could do, but I still felt guilty that I wasn’t home to face death with my friends. Slowly, I made my way to my restaurant.  I pushed open the doors, and quietly walked inside.  No one was there, that I could see, but there were meals on tables.  I went to the kitchen, and there were people there.  Or rather.  You understand, I’m sure.  There was no life anywhere. I was reminded of an ancient song from a stage production.

My apartment was the same.  I didn’t share the space with anyone, but all was still.  I pressed a few keys on my piano, and heard that the extreme cold and then moisture of returning warm air had flexed the soundboard.  My refurbished brass instruments were all cloudy with frost, and as I touched my bagpipes, they were hard with the cold.  I sat down in a chair and let out the grief.  I didn’t know what to do.

I’m really not sure how long I remained sitting there. I’m sure they could have used my help around the ship, but I was being selfish. Or was I?  I needed to get myself under some sort of mental control if I was going to lead others.  I wasn’t a military man.  I was a musician.  A cook, for crying out loud!  What could I do to help these people.  How could I have ended up a supposed leader when I didn’t know what to do now?  I knew how to conduct an orchestra.  Get the strings going on their part, then while keeping the beat going, start the flutes and clarinets.  Bring in the trumpets, then the lower brass, the tell the soloist it is her time to shine.  But how did that translate….

I suddenly realized that I could use the same form of delegation in this situation. Slowly I stood and went to find someone to help me orchestrate our recovery from this fiasco.

---

We had been working on cleanup for three days, when I entered the control room.  John and I had been delegating authority to the general population and we were exhausted.  He was already there, and was slumped in a chair, with his eyes closed.  Marc was scanning through computer code, trying to figure out what was going on.  I slumped into another chair.  Strangely, the control room was the only real place we had to sit down, where we could keep in contact with the rest of the people.  My eyes were getting very heavy when something got through to my fuzzy brain.  Beside me was a flashing light.

“Hey, Marc,” I said, still somewhat drowsy, “What’s this light mean?”

“What light?” he asked, seemingly preoccupied.

“There’s a flashing light over here.”

He stood up, and saw where I was sitting.  It was kinda around the corner from his bank of computer screens, in an alcove.

“What the…” He glanced around me and saw what light I was referring to.  I stood and let him into the console.  “This means we have an incoming message.”

“Incoming message?”  By now, John had come fully awake, as had I.  We were both shocked.  What did this mean?

Marc reached for a switch but hesitated.  “What do you guys think?” he asked.

“Could receiving a message start something else happening?” I asked.

“In theory, sure,” Marc said.  “But then again, anything that’s going to happen could have been programmed into the computers, so why wait for us to flip a switch?”

“So what do we do?  Do we wait for the next… whatever that Caesar has planned, or possibly set it off ourselves?” John asked us.

“We might as well hear it.  Maybe it’s aliens,” I said in a futile attempt at humor.

Marc glanced at John, who nodded. He reached over and touched a control.  A screen came alive and we saw a man.  A human, but not someone we knew.”

“Hello, people of N21,” he said.” I am President Freeman of Earth.  I know when you were sent away, Willem Wallace, or ‘Caesar’ as you referred to him, was the ‘Chancellor’.

“Approximately three hundred years after you left, Wallace had shown enough of his character to make those of us still on Earth recognize what you had long ago seen.  There was an uprising, and we were able to remove him from power.  He was in prison until we received a signal from you.

“Every computer around the world came on at the same time, and showed Wallace seated at his desk. He told us that we were all going to join him in a celebration of your exile.  We saw what your camera’s recorded, Wallace telling you he wanted to ‘play’; the death of your maintenance worker.  Then we saw a bay of the station open, and the people dying on the floor.”  

For a moment, Freeman stopped.  He looked somber, then rubbed his face with his hands.

“Wallace was questioned at length.  That was an experience I never want to have again.  He was, quite simply, insane.  He wanted to toy with you as a cat toys with it’s prey.  Revelling in your suffering was what he wanted most of all.

“He tried to bargain with us with his knowledge.  He wanted freedom, but we refused.  It took several months to obtain what we wanted.  He spent that entire time in and out of consciousness.  It wasn’t pretty.  What we got from him, we want to pass on to you.

“There are several… surprises, in the computers of the station.  They have been left there.  There seems to be no way to remove them from the memory.  Even a complete shutdown will reload the same information when you start them again.

“Much of what is programmed will be worse that what has already happened.  Some not as bad.  We will append a file to this message that will tell you what we have found.  I hope you can find something on board that we didn’t think of here.”

Empty Chairs at Empty Tables lyrics © Warner Chappell Music, Inc
        Songwriters: Alain Albert Boublil / Claude Michel Schonberg / Herbert Kretzmer