Fermi’s Wake: For the Trees – A Sneak Peek
- Uncategorized
- November 26, 2024
We are two days away from the Fermi’s arrival at a forest moon that shouldn’t exist. So what’s the harm in giving you a little peek at the opening pages?
Doctor Naomi Grant had visited Gordon at home a few times. Gordon treated her people, and Naomi bristled to realise she was now very much one of her people, like any other commodity – she ordered it in.
Naomi had been to Gordon’s LA mansion when the CEO hadn’t been able to get out to the cosmodrome for a meeting. She had met Gordon at her apartment in one of the Eg. Corporation’s “Cloud Accommodation” centres – which hurtful people on social media had referred to as Gordon inventing the hotel. She’d been shipped out to Gordon’s California party pad with Rajita, Samson and George for what she had called a “team building weekend”, where out of nerves Naomi had drunk more champagne than she ever had in her life and been bedridden for two days with the consequences.
This time the twelve-hour flight took her to Logan International Airport, to meet a chauffeured car that ferried her to an avenue of redbrick pavements where leafless trees lined up like soldiers outside white and grey colonial mansions. A few of them were already decked out in the sort of full-on, storefront-style Christmas decorations Naomi had only seen in American movies.
“Just walk straight in,” the chauffeur advised as she pulled up outside. “Ms Gordon isn’t the kind of person you ask to open a door.”
“Doesn’t she have people for that kind of thing?” Naomi asked.
“Not here she doesn’t,” the chauffeur said.
Naomi climbed out of the car and pulled her rucksack after her. She had no idea where she was staying tonight. One of Gordon’s assistants’ assistants would have probably arranged something. She was getting used to it, but she still boggled that Gordon lived this way all the time – floorboards being laid out to meet her steps wherever they landed.
A short flight of stairs rose out of banks of long-unswept leaves to a surprisingly prim-looking front door. Naomi opened it to find herself in a small parlour with three more doors and a staircase. It looked, despite Gordon’s net worth and the impressive frontage outside, a lot like Naomi’s nan’s front hallway. But while Nana Grant would have approved of the carpets and the cream wallpaper, she would have baulked at the framed movie posters.
“Hello?” Naomi called out cautiously.
“In here!” Gordon’s voice echoed back, although Naomi had to twist her head to determine where it came from.
Eventually she went through the left-hand door into what would have been, in any normal house, the living room, but Naomi wasn’t sure what you called it when there were six of them.
This one was lined with crammed bookshelves, some stacks of cardboard boxes and, in one corner of the room, a grand piano. Gordon was hunched, crossed-legged on a chaise lounge, scowling at her laptop. She was in a Ren & Stimpy t-shirt and grey jogging bottoms, and was on a videocall.
“Okay, but this report was clearly written by the Fuck Around team. I want you to go away and get me the report written by the Find Out team, got it? I’ve not got much time left on this planet, and I don’t want to waste it with Team Fuck Around.”
Gordon reached down and snapped her laptop shut, then pushed the hair back from her eyes.
“That’s not actually what ‘Fuck around and find out’ means…” Naomi said.
“Are you testing me?” Gordon shot back, then sighed heavily. “Hi Naomi.”
“Umm. Hi,” Naomi said, giving a little wave.
“Gimme a sec, I just need to recite pi for a minute to get that call out of my brain,” Gordon said, raising a hand and closing her eyes.
Naomi waited in silence and scanned the spines of the nearest bookcase.
Several books on AI. Biographies of famous rocket scientists and several pharaohs and Roman emperors. A photo book of the city of Pompeii.
Naomi was considering taking a step closer to read the spines she couldn’t make out when Gordon took a deep breath and said, “Right. Sorry to drag you out here. I’ve spent the last twenty-five years making myself indispensable to this company and now I’ve got less than a month to teach them to zip themselves up after they piss.”
“That sounds stressful,” Naomi said.
She gestured to the room around them.
“Is this your home?” she asked. “I mean, is this like, your actual home?”
Gordon shrugged.
“I bought it while I was still at Harvard, before I got too wealthy and had to move the whole company out to the Silicon Wasteland,” she said.
She pointed over her shoulder, “Through there’s the dining table Eg. Corporation had its first board meeting at. Upstairs is the study where I coded the architecture for Eg. Digital Systems.”
“What about the grand piano?” Naomi asked.
“I thought I might learn to play the piano,” Gordon said. “Never found time.”
She sighed.
“These days the place is mostly a storage depot. My movie memorabilia and old books and anything with sentimental value gets shipped here. My actual living-in houses I like to keep a bit more spartan.”
Naomi, who had seen Gordon’s more “spartan” homes, raised an eyebrow but did not say anything. Anyway, before she had a chance to respond had already Gordon sighed emphatically and added, “But also nobody comes looking for me here, so it’s a good place to control my own workflow.”
“So!” she continued, unperturbed by Naomi’s silence.
She spun around and kicked her feet over the side of the chaise lounge.
“Take a seat.”
She pointed to an armchair with a stack of technical manuals on it.
“Do you know why you’re here?”
Naomi carefully placed the manuals on the floor, sat down and said, “Well, I’m hoping you’re finally going to tell me what this is all about.”
“And what,” Gordon said, “do you think this is about?”
“Well, for the last six months you’ve had me training at a disused cosmonaut facility in Kazakhstan, carrying out launch and ejection drills, G-force training, and bouncing around a neutral buoyancy pool in a spacesuit,” Naomi said. “My classmates are a theoretical physicist from Leicester, an American test pilot, and a Mr Universe-looking guy who talks like the narrator in a wartime propaganda reel.”
“Yes, yes, skip the potatoes and get to the meat,” Gordon said, waving her on.
“So, I’m thinking, where do you need a medically qualified marine biologist with astronaut training?” Naomi said. “I did wonder if you were planning a mission to Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Right? All the other billionaires are doing their little orbital jaunts while talking a big game about Mars. But Europa? That’d really be something to show off when you all meet up at the next Epstein island. But that would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?”
“Absolutely ridiculous,” Gordon agreed, but she was smirking.
Naomi nodded.
“So, I think you probably want to do one of those pretend Mars missions as a PR stunt? You’ve got a biologist slash doctor, a physicist and a pilot, and the guy who looks like a super high-end bouncer I’m guessing is some sort of outdoor survival specialist?”
With each sentence Naomi looked up at Gordon, prowling her face for the slightest reaction.
“I think you want to put us all in some underground bunker with screensavers on the windows, or in a plastic dome on a tundra somewhere, and see how long it takes us to kill each other.”
Gordon smiled. Naomi didn’t like it.
“Could you do me a favour, and just close those curtains up there?” she asked, waving to the large bay windows.
Naomi got up and drew the curtains, then turned round to see Gordon was sweeping piles of books and papers off the coffee table between them, to reveal polished black glass underneath.
Gordon tapped the glass, and it erupted into a giant white screen. It was showing footage of a black and white comic book space rocket firing off the launch pad.
“The V2 rocket. The first manmade object to enter space,” Gordon said. “Every inch we’ve reached into space, we’ve done so off the back of this rocket…”
A few minutes later, Naomi was staring, astonished, at an exploded diagram of a space shuttle (although not the space shuttle, as Gordon had explained) threaded through the middle of a tire-shaped habitat ring, itself inside a larger ring, connected by two curved arms to an engine behind the space shuttle that Gordon told her was full of nuclear bombs and a tear in reality.
“And you’ve found it?” Naomi asked.
“Found it. Boarded it. Upgraded most of the computers and a few of the soft furnishings. Now we’re planning our inaugural trip,” Gordon said.
She swiped the ship aside, and brought up a diagram of concentric circles, some of them with other circles travelling around them.
“The Trappist-1 system,” Gordon explained. “Positively next door, in cosmic terms. Less than forty light years away, but also, it has this.”
She pointed to the three median circles, which flashed green at her touch.
“Three, possibly four worlds. Not too hot. Not too cold,” she said. “There could be liquid water here. Which in turn means…”
“Life,” Naomi said, and an emotion started nosing its way through the thick wall of culture shock.
“A bit better than Europa, don’t you think?”
The emotion was despair.
“Thank you for the opportunity,” Naomi said, standing up. “But I’m afraid I must decline.”
Gordon was not put out.
“Please, sit down. Tell me your reasoning,” she said. “All your projects are funded, don’t worry. I won’t renege on our deal. But I am offering you stupid amounts of money to take the journey of a lifetime, a journey anyone in your field might actually kill for. I don’t think an explanation is too much to ask?”
Naomi sat back down. The ride was over. All that was left to do was speak her piece.
“You’re going to wreck it,” she said.
If you want to read the rest of this story, Fermi’s Wake: For the Trees is out on Thursday. You can pre-order it individually at Scarlet Ferret or Amazon, or you can buy the Fermi’s Wake season pass at Scarlet Ferret.
The first four Fermi tales are collected in Fermi’s Progress, available as a season pass from Scarlet Ferret or as a paperback from Amazon.
