Rogue Command (The Kalahari Series) (60 page)

FIRST COLONY

EVOLUTION

AJ Marshall

M
Press
Books

About the Series

The science fiction work
First Colony
is a series containing five novels. Together, the books span the century immediately after the first human ‘off planet’ birth. By 2050, Moon base Andromeda had expanded from its initial, tentative, portacabin-like modules, into a sprawling labyrinth of double and triple storied architectural units built from materials mined on the Moon’s surface.

After the Proclamation of Independence in May 2050, the new ‘Senate of Lunar Colonisation’ removed the military-like regime under which Andromeda’s two thousand inhabitants lived and worked and implemented a self-governing, self-sustainable democracy based on the charter of the American Declaration of Independence. Those who would return to Earth amid its energy calamity and climatic strife did so, but those who remained formed the populous of the
First Colony
. The strict rules governing male and female fraternisation in Andromeda and the immediate return to earth of women falling ‘illegally’ pregnant whilst on space duties was abolished. Cohabitation was allowed, even encouraged, and the first baby was born nine months to the day after lunar independence. His name was Aaron Wu, born of a British mother and a Chinese father.

First Colony
charts the life and legacy of this first so-called ‘Luman’ – a human born in the lunar colonies. Aaron Wu’s life begins innocently enough – the result of unique events entwined with fate. Each of the five books then covers two decades in his life, ending with his death in 2153. The novels will set out the trials and tribulations of this character as he rises to becoming the first elected president of an independent space colony.

BOOK 1: EVOLUTION

Lumans are essentially the same as the humans that preceded them; however, by nature of the changed environment in which they live, minor genetic anomalies are to be expected. When the first of their kind – some say ‘subspecies’ – visit Earth in 2069, their welcome is euphoric. Such elation is, however, short lived. Suppressed racial intolerance rises again, bolstered by hardship and food shortages.

Born on the same day as Aaron, but in a small American town in Arizona, a young woman closely studies a one-metre diameter hologram of the Moon in her bedroom. A little above the floor, the surreal image slowly rotates and the young woman encircles it transfixed. In her nineteen years of life – mainly below the earth’s surface – Jessie Parker has never seen the Moon with her own eyes. This because the dense suffocating layer of contaminated cloud that surrounds the Earth has neither lifted nor dispersed in her lifetime. She instinctively knows, however, that her destiny lies on that neighbouring planetoid, where immigration is illegal and political accord with Earth’s teetering governments is strained at best.

Author’s Comment

First Colony
is a futuristic novel about man colonising the Moon. As our neighbour and partner in the vastness of space, the Moon’s close proximity dictates much more than just the rising and ebbing of our ocean tides. Since time began, the Moon has influenced the very fabric of our existence. Indeed, without the presence of this apparently inert body, the Earth would not have become an oasis for any species, least of all ours.

The predictable and eternal passage of the Moon through the night sky has etched its form into the subconscious of each and every generation that has preceded us. And so too, whether in desperation or not, it was just a matter of time before man viewed this familiar place as an achievable goal, with a frontier to be crossed like any other and subsequently a new land to be settled. Like the Americas centuries before, a new world beckoning, with new opportunities and with new dreams over a distant horizon. However, as is often the case, the old lessons learned are quickly forgotten as humankind rushes to stake its claim – except that the irradiated cold of space and the desolate Moon are far less forgiving than any frontier that has beckoned before.

The novel
First Colony
is a work composed of five volumes and the storyline, by nature of being set in the future is essentially science fiction. However, fantasy it is not, as the science described in the books is either fact or based on fact. Indeed, the author’s style and his previous works reflect highly believable scenarios.

First Colony
is about man’s inevitable pursuit of the unknown and his innate necessity to colonise; driven in this case as much by environmental calamity as by instinct. It is about the relentless advance of technology and the misuse of knowledge.

First Colony
is about high adventure and love, about deceit, greed and the unexpected. It is about the dissolving power of governments and the emergence of the all-consuming ‘Corporation’. It is an intelligent crime thriller as well as an emotional rollercoaster. It is about Neil Armstrong’s legacy and the immortal words he spoke as he stepped from the landing craft
Eagle
on 20 July 1969 as mankind held its breath.

The
First Colony
Series:
Availability:

2013     
First Colony – Evolution

2014     
First Colony – Forgotten Gods

2015     
First Colony – Quantum

2016     
First Colony – Planets

2017     
First Colony – Thoughts

Prologue

Everyone experiences grief at some point in their lives, although its intensity, I now know, is subjective. My first recollection of this debilitating emotion was not my own, but my mother’s, and I remember exactly when it occurred. At that precise moment in time, and because of an accident, this ‘melancholy’ flooded into our lives like water through a breached dam, and for years after I fought to shore up the damage. It was an emotion I tried enormously to forget – to relegate to the recesses of my mind. Perhaps that’s why my primary school teacher reported me as hyperactive, amongst other things.

The day before my fifth birthday started innocuously enough, but by midday we knew that my father was dead and thereafter the hell that contains all the sadness, all the wretchedness, all the misery of people, opened beneath our house. My mother immediately fell into that fiery underworld and soon she had dragged me down with her. I didn’t kick and scream – at the time I had no idea where I was going. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I can’t help feeling that even at five I should have flailed my arms and grasped something – that I should have held on for dear life, seizing any and all opportunities before we both vanished into that pit. A purple tree . . . that man Jesus from Earth . . . my pet robot . . . anything – or at least shouted for help or left a trail, like Hansel and Gretel did in the Brothers Grimm story. For longer than I care to remember we floundered beneath that house, or ‘module’, as it really was. Looking back, it was three years before I climbed high enough to get a hand-hold on the edge of the precipice. At eight years old, I felt like fifteen.

My father died in a mining accident. I’ll fill you in on the details later, but he was thirty-eight years old – as was my mother at the time. In fact their birthdays were just a week apart. An Earth week, I mean, not a lunar week – because, unlike me, they were both born on the Earth. They were both sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day, three hundred and sixty five days in a year, and so on and so on, type people – again, unlike me. Because I grew up in a different time reference; although my mother would never admit to it.

My early life was disorientating, and not because of my father’s absence – although that didn’t help – but because life revolved around ‘Earth’ time from as early as I can remember. Of all the clocks in our home, only one was on lunar time. That was the school clock, and even then it was one of those antique, twin-faced, battery-powered models, with the other face always set on Greenwich Mean Time – always!

GMT, it was at odds with Lunar Corrected Time, creating a sort of bio antagonism, and it served to confuse. All of my friends at school were so young when their parents transitioned that they never experienced the ‘terrestrial effect’, that was only for the ‘oldies’. Retrospectively, however, one helpful thing did result from all those years of disturbed biorhythms – at the age of eighteen, when I first visited the Earth to start my university education, I didn’t suffer from lunoxia – not once, never: no dizziness, no diarrhoea, no insomnia. And believe me, with all the other things going on at the time, that was a great help.

To explain further: my parents were human and their bio-clocks were fixed. Indeed, even after thirty-three years as a colonist – and in her last twenty she never left the Moon– my mother’s biorhythms hardly changed. She was subconsciously tied to the terrestrial calendar, as with most of the ‘oldies’ . . . the First Generation. There were a few who adapted, I recall – those who were still in their teens when they came across – but they were the minority. Most FGs arrived when they were in their thirties, were in stable relationships – with their partners back on Earth – and they had had their intended quota of children prior to taking up a lunar appointment. In those days an ‘appointment’ meant three years.
Maturity
and
stability
– they were the key words when recruiting the lunar workforce. In reality of course, back then, in the First Decade, it was NASA’s call as to who was accepted into the programme and who was not, and they, NASA I mean, were shit scared of being sued over excessive radiation exposure. Body defects, early death, child deformities – radiation had a lot to answer for. Of course, it was never the problem they believed it would be. Yes, hindsight is a wonderful thing.

The lunar colony claimed its independence on 21 May 2050, and on that same day, after the old rules had been ‘dispatched’ back to Earth on the ‘last’ shuttle – banished, along with any sentiment for the home planet, all the brewing, brooding relationships surfaced like bubbling lava from a volcano. The strict, military-style regulations on cohabitation, the segregated accommodation, the threat of being sent home the moment a pregnancy was detected – and a hormone check was compulsory every month – the no-fraternising and no-touching rules, the authority’s obsession and anxiety regarding birth defects, everything, it all simply dissolved into oblivion. There was a lot of bed-hopping that first night by all accounts, and my mother and father were no exception: free love, like the hippy movement on Earth almost a century earlier. Apparently it was mayhem – total chaos: a twenty-four hour party. Nine months later, to the day, I was the first out. Others soon followed, but I was the first. They called me a Luman – a human born in the lunar colony. I was the first Luman. A fact that would enhance and haunt in varying measures each and every day of my life – so far. There were twenty-eight of us, I remember. We all knew each other, but Stefanie was my best friend. I loved her even then, I think. She lived in the module next door for a while, before her family moved to the new Insularum Estate, over on the east side of Andromeda.

We all arrived for our first day of primary school in pristine white uniforms, like thinly padded spacesuits, and saying goodbye set my mother crying again. I was used to it and I could deal with it like a nonchalant teenager would, even though I was only six years old. But I wasn’t immune. I would always put an arm around her and provide some comfort – as best I could as an infant; perhaps a little better later, as a junior. The earlier years of pre-school, three of them, lower, middle and upper, were more a playgroup affair and half days. I remember always wanting to stay longer. Just to be out of that module was a joy, but to me Stefanie made each day there seem like the one before Christmas.

The day before Christmas . . . ah yes . . . that day. A happy time for me; always was, and always will be. Why? Because my mother was too – happy, open, sharing and talkative. Actually, it was more the anticipation of the following day that excited my mother and she would smile freely and communicate – make calls, invite people over.

Christmas Day itself, on the other hand, was a particular and peculiar ‘Earth Day’, and I learnt early that such Earth Days had the opposite effect on her. Christmas Day was, in fact, that ‘special day’ they tried to slot into a niche in the lunar calendar – ‘they’ being the Lunar Senate. Of course, there was no niche, in fact there was no place for it at all – never has been, and in my view, never will be – except, perhaps, as a remembrance day. To remind me of it, however, so that it stands out like a radiation burn, my mother
always
cried on that day – perhaps more than on any other. As my mother was essentially a Christian and I was bought up with their beliefs and values – beneath that somewhat misplaced ‘planetary umbrella’ so to speak – these were our days, but there were similar, equally significant days for the other great ‘terrestrial’ religions. And there were also other days they tried to integrate. These were deemed less important and so didn’t warrant ‘Colony Day’ status, which was a day off, like a bank holiday on Earth. Easter Day, Boxing Day, Shrove Tuesday, Palm Sunday. Clearly they meant something to the Oldies, but to us Lumans . . . me . . . they were just annotations on the first calendars that gradually vanished over the years. Scientology had a niche, however, if you could call its brief popularity that. For our neighbours in Module 101 it was important. I remember heated discussions over the dinner table between my mother and her friends and articles in the
Lunar Times
. But again, by the Second Decade that too had petered out.

After my mother had sent me to university on Earth – in her home town of Oxford in the Dual Kingdom, England and Wales, and against my wishes, I might add – I found forgetting my mother’s ever-lasting grief much easier. Upon reflection, it was just because other types of grief took the place of my missing father. I’ll come to the story of Stefanie in a moment. But for now, at the age of twenty-one, and as I recount my life to this point, I can honestly say that I understand what my mother went through when my Dad died.