Emily Taylor - The Apprentice

  5.

  God turned back into the punk alien reptile thing with spikes sticking out its head then clicked his fingers. Emily found herself in a clothes store. Alien dummies stood, lay and hovered about the place in all sorts of funny poses, wearing the latest fashions.

  ‘It all looks about a thousand years out of date,’ said Emily.

  ‘It is, but there’s a range based on the Star Trek series and a line for woman the same as Emma Peel wears in The Avengers.’

  Emily picked out a long flowing dress and tried it on. ‘It looks like something Jesus’s mum might have worn,’ she said.

  Zeus replied, ‘Don’t make fun of my wife’s taste!’ He was trying to sound serious but broke into a smile.

  ‘Oops! Sorry!’ said Emily.

  Emily pulled on a black, one piece catsuit from the Emma Peel range. It felt wonderful and fitted like glue. The label at the back said, Laser proof, photon proof, shrink and stink proof, stain resistant and self-cleaning. One size fits all.

  ‘They make to order too,’ said Zeus.

  ‘Great, can I put an order in?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But how will I pay for these?’ said Emily. ‘And... I owe you for the asteroid too.’

  ‘You do, but don’t worry for the moment. I’m sure that given time, things will even up.’

  ‘Okay then, I’ll have a Tuareg tent from the desert, bright blue, some jeans, a couple of T-shirts, a pink polka dot bikini, a pair of flip-flops, an umbrella, and a big burgundy shawl.’

  ‘We’ll supply the desert clothes, and the shawl, for the rest you’ll need to visit the slugs.’

  ‘Can’t we shop just a little bit longer?’ pleaded Emily.

  ‘Online shopping!’ said Zeus firmly, in a big God voice, drumming this fingers with exasperation. ‘Let’s go see Psyche.’

  ‘Funny name for an asteroid,’ said Emily as they walked out onto the surface.

  ‘It is a bit, but we like it.’

  ‘Like what? There’s nothing here.’

  Apart from the clothes shop, there was quite literally nothing; just an expanse of dust and craters; no sky, no clouds, just a constellation of Sentry Moons orbiting randomly overhead.

  ‘Security is pretty tight here. It’s our headquarters,’ said Zeus.

  They walked across the surface and down into a crater leaving footprints in the soft dust.

  Noting that there were no other prints, Emily said, ‘No one has been here for ages.’

  ‘No one ever comes here. It all happens downstairs,’ said Zeus and clicked his fingers.

  Some stairs appeared in the beige dust. They follow them down and climbed into an elevator. As it descended to asteroidean elevator music, Zeus gave Emily the run down on Psyche.

  ‘It’s an M-type asteroid that’s two hundred kilometres in diameter. It’s the ideal size as we can fit just about any asteroid in. There are two bigger ones which we have plans for, but we’ll refurbish them in situ. Don’t come to us, we’ll come to you.

  ‘The M in M-type stands for metallic. Psyche has an iron-nickel shell ten kilometres thick. It is superbly strong, giving good shielding and protection, but at the same time is easy to work with. A photon lance cuts through it like a hot knife through butter, so it is easy to cut out hanger doors and workshops.’

  The elevator stopped and they walked out into a large office space. Large 3-D models of asteroids hovered in mid-air. An anode, the same as Zeus, stood in front of each sphere and smaller fish-tailed aliens floated around tinkering and making adjustments.

  ‘Us anodes are the organisers and the skinny fish-tailed zinodes are the workers.’ said Zeus. ‘As you’ll find out, they’re hardworking, vivacious and love to party. They’re the friendly aliens of the Universe, you bump into them everywhere. They have a short lifespan, about a hundred and fifty years but live life to the full. They’re happy and easy going and have no loyalties except to their children. They’re complete cowards. Creation is their thing, they love to design and build so are in their element refitting asteroids.

  ‘They come from the same galaxy as us. We’re symbiotic; we rely on each other for survival. Like us, they’re telepathic and can teleport. They have three asteroids of their own, Vesta, Susumu and Hygiea. The football games between them are a sight to behold. I’ll take you to one. Their football is three dimensional and played with eleven balls. With that tail of theirs, boy can they kick!’

  ‘Woof, woof! Dog!’ taunted an anode.

  He was younger than Zeus and wore a flowing blue robe. Zeus didn’t seem fussed at all about being teased. He gave the anode a friendly handshake.

  ‘Got yourself a flea?’ continued the anode, looking at Emily.

  ‘Yes, and a lovely one too!’ replied Zeus. ‘She’s called Emily Taylor.’

  The anode shook Emily’s hand reluctantly and continued with his work.

  ‘Ignore him,’ said Zeus. ‘Most of the anodes don’t have a lot of time for teroids. Like I said, the Earth Affairs department is the lowest of the low. Apart from my two sons, Jesus and Azziz, I’m at the bottom rung of the ladder in the anode world. It doesn’t bother me, when you’re at the bottom, there is only one way to go, up!

  ‘So, please don’t take any nasty, snide remarks to heart.’ He put his hand on Emily’s shoulder and smiled at her. ‘Myself, I quite like humans.’

  Moving close to one of the spheres, Zeus said, ‘This is a working model. It’s an exact replica of an asteroid that’s coming in to be refitted. According to the customer’s requirements we need to get the basics sorted first. We work according to GABES Law. G comes first, gravity, followed by A for atmosphere, B for biosphere, E for energy and last but not least, S for security. Once you know how much gravity is required, everything else follows on.’

  They walked through the office looking at the superbly detailed models.

  ‘How do you make the models?’ asked Emily.

  Zeus swept an arm around, his fingers passing through a model. ‘They’re computer generated plans. At a thought, you can strip a model down to show just one component, like the black hole implanted in the centre, the water, the atmosphere, a certain type of tree, animals or energy systems. Each component is on a layer and you can build up or strip down layers as required. The model will shake and curse you if you make a mistake; put fish in a desert, trees in the sea, anything daft that won’t work.’

  ‘I’d love to do the designing,’ said Emily.

  ‘Mostly we give the clients what they want. You know the old adage, the customer is always right, but sometimes we’re given a free rein, which is fun when it happens. Sometimes we’ll make something for ourselves, like your one, Camillo. That’s one of my projects.’

  ‘You did a great job, I like it!’

  Leaving the office, they walked down a long corridor that went on forever. It was so long that up ahead, perspective pulled the four corners together until they met in the middle.

  ‘I could do with a bit of exercise,’ said Zeus, striding ahead so fast that Emily had to jog to keep up.

  While they walked, Zeus gave Emily the low down about gravity.

  ‘What we’re doing here is a whole new idea. When we were stranded in space surrounded by big chunks of smashed planet something odd was going on. Odd things always happen in space. Asteroids and chunks of rock kept vanishing. Obviously some got sucked into Jupiter or shot off into space but even with that taken into account, we were losing mass. Stuff was going missing. There was only one explanation; we were in the middle of a field of black holes. They range from a few micrometres to about ten centimetres across and are voracious; they make the slimeballs from Pluto look tame! They suck in anything that’s near them. It simply disappears.

  ‘One of the zinodes suggested catching them. “What for?” we asked. Who in their right mind would mess with black holes!

  ‘They pointed out that if you could catch and tame a black hole, you could stick in inside an asteroid and have gravit
y. Once you have gravity, you’re in business. You can put atmosphere around a planet and water on the surface and it stays there. Once you have those, just add life!

  ‘After a bit of trial and error; learning by our mistakes as we went, we finally managed to catch a black hole. That’s where the slimeballs came from; they were genetically engineered to catch black holes. The idea was to use a blue hole to catch a black hole, one of our many false starts. They took a liking to living organic matter, not the sort of matter you find in black holes.

  ‘Then we ran into problems with antimatter. We thought for a while that the whole universe might implode but finally we cracked it. We have rings filled with compressed antimatter. In effect they’re white holes. Four rings are made, fitted together with a common pivot at each end, each ring with a slightly different diameter so they can pull open and lie flat like the old gin traps used to catch animals. As like matter repels, the rings want to spring shut to form a cage, like a bird cage but spherical.

  ‘Opposites attract. If you take matter in its purest forms, a black hole and white rings, the forces pull them together. You simply have to lob a white ring at a black hole and it’ll circle it like Saturn’s rings. Release the safety catch and the black hole is in a cage, black hole and antimatter virtually cancelling each other out.’

  Zeus is on another plane, like our physics teacher at school, but I think I’ve got the gist of it.

  ‘So if the black hole is the mouse and the white rings are the mouse trap, then the force that attracts them together is cheddar cheese,’ said Emily, trying to get her head around it.

  ‘Errr, yes,’ said Zeus politely and then continued with his techno gobbledygook. ‘A black hole with the mass of your moon, five thousand trillion tons, is about ten centimetres across. Get your sums right, put it in an antimatter cage and you can carry it about in your pocket! Drill a wee hole down to the centre of an asteroid. Reinforce around the core a little, drop your black hole in, remove the antimatter cage and voila, an asteroid with gravity! We all like a bit of gravity, it keeps our feet firmly on the ground!’

  ‘But how do you find a black hole in black space?’ asked Emily.

  ‘We fired out millions of ball bearings, and the sentry slugs tracked their trajectories, mapping out five hundred thousand black holes to within a metre of their positions. They aren’t black you know, you can actually see them. They glow and give off radiation and particles. It’s dangerous work catching them. Young sentry slugs love the work. To start with, they used robots, but now they’ve refined the art and with a bit of practice can throw the antimatter rings like quoits. They virtually wind the window down and lasso them, without even getting out.’

  They walked and walked down the corridor until a black square appeared in the middle. It grew until Zeus took Emily by the hand and said, ‘Stop here!’

  The corridor ended and there was nothing, just a black void, cross-crossed by some faint purple lines. They stopped right on the very edge, peering out into the darkness.

  ‘It’s dark in here, must be coffee break, let me find the light switch.’ said Zeus, as he reached around the corner with his three fingered hand.

  Click!

  There was a flickering of lights and the inside of Psyche lit up. It was a massive workshop. Half a dozen asteroids of different sizes floated in mid-air, tethered by purple energy beams.

  ‘Let’s go have a look,’ said Zeus.

  A clear bubble suddenly appeared in front of them. Zeus clicked his fingers and they were inside it, sitting on a couple of bright green bean bags. They floated across the vast hanger to the nearest asteroid.

  ‘This is Timossi; it’s just come in. The big drilling rig you can see is boring a hole down to the centre. Once it’s there, a round chamber about a metre across is cut out and reinforced. Black holes are dropped in until the required gravity is reached then the hole is plugged. Once we have gravity we can do the landscaping.’

  Moving on to the next one, Zeus said, ‘This is a rare type V, a basaltic asteroid; lovely crusty exterior. It’s easy to work with and holds its form for millennia. You can carve Yosemite type valleys and vertical sea cliffs; it’s wonderful stuff. The beam flickering away is a photon laser cutting out the landscape. It makes a lot of smoke. Normally we prefer the cut and fill method; you scoop out a lake and use the rock and rubble to make a hill. There’s no wastage that way, but these clients are very particular.

  ‘Just about all of our clients require water features. Seas, lakes, rivers and waterfalls are very popular. That’s why the design stage is so important because it’s hard to change features once the water is in place. The basaltic asteroids are the most expensive, and rich clients are fickle. There’s bound to be a few change orders on this one once the wife sees it.’

  Their bubble followed along the contours, passing very close to the lasers, then through the cloud of dense smoke and across the void to the next asteroid.

  ‘This one is getting its atmosphere,’ said Zeus, pointing to some big pipes coming out from the wall of Psyche and leading down to the surface of the asteroid.

  ‘Is that why Earth has an ozone hole?’ asked Emily. ‘Are you pinching our atmosphere?’

  ‘Nnnnnnn, Nnn, No....,’ replied Zeus, reddening up and not sounding very convincing. ‘No, this atmosphere is manufactured from comets.

  ‘The water too,’ he added, quickly moving on to the next asteroid, which had water flowing out of big pipes, filling the seas and lakes. ‘Try catching a comet. It makes black hole hunting seem like child’s play. In fact, we catch them using black holes. We trap them, decelerate them to a stop then manoeuvre them into a position where we can siphon off the water and gases. We have massive holding tanks on Psyche.

  ‘Once we have atmosphere and water, we can add plant and animal life, if that’s what our client wants. Animals are easy but it takes time to collect them and they can be very fussy. We had some funny birds recently that had to have salt water with ice floating on top and would only eat fish of a certain size that they had to catch themselves. We don’t like to take living animals unless there is a population explosion, so we watch and wait then fish them out when they die. It takes patience and concentration so is very much a job for the sentry slugs.

  ‘Plants take time. A forest of redwood trees takes hundreds of years to grow, but again, we can fish them out just as they’re felled or destroyed by fire.’

  ‘How do you fish them out?’ ask Emily, wondering how she got up here.

  ‘They’re teleported. The easiest is a straight teleport like we’ve been doing to get about. It’s quick, it’s painless and it’s easy. It is like using the cut function on a computer then pasting elsewhere. But we can’t take matter out of an ecosystem or remove it where it might be missed, so that’s copy and paste, leaving the copy behind and taking the original with its soul or life force along. Each atom has to be replicated. It takes massive amounts of energy and it hurts. Were you a bit sore when you arrived?’

  ‘Just a bit,’ said Emily remembering the agony of her arrival in the rainstorm. ‘So a copy of me is still on Earth.’

  ‘Yes, your body is still there. They’ll probably dig it out in a few days. They’re going through the wreckage with a tooth comb looking for that warhead.’

  ‘Bin Laden took it.’

  ‘So they’ll find you instead.’

  ‘What about your son, Azziz. Was he killed too?’

  ‘He was. That’ll teach him a lesson. He’ll rise up in a week or two. We won’t hear from him for a while. If you get killed when you’re transfigured, it’s really painful and takes ages to reconfigure.’

  ‘You don’t like your sons do you?’

  ‘No, they’re an embarrassment.’

  ‘Or are you an embarrassment to them, Dog?’ said Emily.

  ‘Shhhh,’ said God. ‘It’s a touchy subject! Let’s get back to the trees.’

  The bubble drifted through a grove of huge redwood trees.

 
‘Here they’ve put in a plantation of redwoods but the rest of the forest is being grown from seedlings from our nursery asteroids. It’s labour intensive and requires patience, one thing our customers are often short of.

  ‘The biosphere is a bit of an art. It’s such a delicate balance that it’s been a steep learning curve for us. If we make a mistake, things start dying. Earth based asteroids are getting easier now you guys are suddenly taking an interest in the plants and animals that are dying around you but it’s still trial and error. When there’s a dissatisfied customer we go in and figure out what went wrong. Did they ask for something daft or did we make a mistake? Either way we need to sort out the problems, customer satisfaction is what it’s all about.

  ‘Energy is another thing that needs tailoring to an asteroid. What are the requirements? Normally we can keep an asteroid or parts of it hot or cold by adjusting the atmosphere, rotation, gravity or orbit, but some need heating or have high energy requirements, like say, a big waterfall run by a pump. Then we need an energy source. We used to siphon hydrogen off Jupiter’s atmosphere and use fuel cells but that’s old, clumsy technology. Since taming black holes we have learnt to tap into the massive amounts of energy they contain. That way we can take power off the black hole in the centre of an asteroid to supply virtually unlimited power. You have to be a bit careful, too small a black hole and you can start losing gravity if you leave the lights on. Things start to float away.

  ‘I’m not boring you, am I?’ asked Zeus. ‘You seem awful quiet.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ said Emily. ‘It’s all just so amazing, carry on.’

  ‘If we find that we don’t have enough power or the client’s requirements change, we can always drop a rock in. We’ll go and visit the black hole shop and I’ll show you,’ he said, as the bubble swerved sharply just clipping another bubble. The other driver gave Zeus the fingers and got down on all fours and cocked his leg.

  ‘They are mean to you,’ said Emily, feeling a little sorry for Zeus.

  ‘That’s anodes for you,’ said Zeus. ‘We’re not the most pleasant of creatures, just look at the Greek Gods!’

  They entered a room that led off the hanger and with a click of Zeus’s fingers they were outside the bubble and standing in front on some large granite boulders ranging from washing machine to bus size.

  ‘These,’ said Zeus, ‘are rocks. They have tiny black holes in them, some just millimetres across. The rock absorbs the energy and acts as a giant battery. Any device within five klicks can tap into the power source. We’re doing a roaring trade in these around the Galaxy. It’s bigger business than the asteroids. It is funny how doing the unthinkable, catching a black hole, can have so many spin offs.’

  They walked past the rocks to a row of racks containing little cages with glowing, swirling things inside.

  ‘Black holes?’ asked Emily. ‘They’re cute!’

  ‘Yes these are black holes. But, there’s nothing cute about a black hole. Watch your fingers. If you touch one, it’ll suck you in in a nanosecond and squish you so, so small that it’s beyond comprehension. That one there,’ he said, pointing to one the size of a grapefruit, ‘contains the same mass as Earth’s moon. Amazing, eh?’

  Emily picked it up and tossed it to Zeus. He caught it ever so gingerly, went all shaky and had to sit down.

  Once he’d recovered himself enough to speak, he said in a shaky voice, ‘Don’t you ever do that to me again!’

  ‘Squeak, squeak,’ said Emily. ‘Man or mouse?’

  ‘Us anodes are tough,’ he said. ‘Virtually indestructible, but we’re totally defenceless against a black hole. I’d be like a feather being sucked into the vacuum cleaner from hell!’

  ‘So they’d make quite a weapon then.’

  ‘It doesn’t even bear thinking about.’

  Their footsteps echoed off the walls as they walked to the other end of the giant room then passed through a door into a hanger full of security moons.

  ‘Lastly,’ said Zeus, ‘comes security. Partly for our own security, we insist on having at least two security moons for each asteroid, but some customers want more or install their own security systems. Security moons are much more complex than they look. Because slugs grow and get quite big they used to have to swap moons as they got bigger. During the swap they were particularly vulnerable, like hermit crabs when they change shells.’

  ‘Heaven forbid,’ Emily said. ‘Someone might see their yellow bits!’

  Zeus laughed.

  ‘We only managed to expel the Titans by waiting for the moment the slugs were having a swap meet to stage a coup. Now, we’ve molecularly engineered the moons to grow with the slug, like a seashell grows to accommodate its inhabitant.’

  ‘So apart from the slimeballs, who do the moons defend against?’ asked Emily.

  ‘Hades and the Titans. They’re firing the slimeballs at us. I think they’re biding their time, waiting for us to let down our guard and then they’ll attack. If they defeat us, they’ll take over Earth.

  ‘Also, we get the odd UFO, different types of spacecraft from other galaxies, even from other dimensions. Generally they’re friendly and follow inter-spatial protocol, but a strong show of force and constant vigilance is the best defence we have. The bad guys will go for an easier target elsewhere. We like to be prickly, like a porcupine!’

  Walking past the security moons, they reached rows of odd shaped craft. ‘These are fighters for anodes to use. In an emergency anyone can grab one. We hold regular drills. Come for a blast sometime, I’ll teach you to fly one!’

  ‘Wow, can I use the guns?’ asked Emily.

  ‘Of course you can,’ said Zeus.

  ‘Lately we’ve been getting lots of probes, sent from Earth by the teroids. The early ones just took a few photos on their way to other destinations. There was Pioneer, Voyager, Ulysses, Galileo and a string of others. The latest one, Dawn Mission, is making a thorough exploration of Ceres. We just make sure that the probes send back the photos the teroids want to see, what they expect to see, nothing! Teroids don’t like surprises.’

  ‘I do!’

  ‘Good!’ said Zeus and clicked his fingers.

  Zimp!

  They were back on the beach on Camillo. In front of them stood Emily’s new house, just as she’d imagined it, but better.

  ‘Oh, thanks Zeus!’ she said, giving him a big hug.