<< | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | >>
Tim returned to Aide and agreed to be a part of his plan. When the time had come for Tim to leave university he applied to work at the UWRI station on Mars. He bluffed his way through the interviews claiming he’d started his degree before he’d heard of wormholes and now desperately wanted to be a part of it – totally believable in the current climate. Suckers. He landed a low level position as a test data entry clerk and spent six dull weeks entering periodic performance evaluation figures from the wormhole apparatus on Mars into the UWRI central database. Thousands upon thousands of lines of numbers and symbols which meant nothing to him, even with his science degree. Two others from Aide’s group managed to get work at the station. One, Max, doing the same as Tim. Another, Ed, using his maths degree to get a lab technician position. The weeks dragged on. Although mutual friends of Aide’s, Tim didn’t share much in common with the other two guys. He spent most evenings in his quarters, staring out of his window to the red desert beyond. Drawn by the dust devils on the horizon into day dreams. Trying not to think too hard about what may happen to him if they were successful in their task. More importantly, what was going to happen to others.
“People will die.” Tim had put to Aide.
“Yes, people will die.” Aide sighed.
“How can we justify that?”
“Justify? Justify? Tim, in the last three years over a million people have died in Africa from famine due to drought. Three years of drought. That drought has hit Asia this year and is predicted to do the same next year. People are dying Tim and what’s the rest of the world doing about it? Booking fucking holidays to Mars!”
Aide was right. Something had to be done.
Tim was awoken from his day dream by the tube ride reaching its destination. The three filed out of the train and walked in silence across the platform to a lift marked “Terminus Level”. Once out of the lift the three navigated their way off the main walkways and through a number of service accesses and I.D checkpoints using a stolen I.D chip that Ed had managed to acquire through ‘necessarily violent means’. Finally, the last checkpoint, required the I.D chip and DNA verification. Yet again Ed had been successful in his part of the plan and gained access to the station’s security system. Once in, it was a simple case of adding the I.D chip’s numerical key and a digital copy of his DNA to his own security profile, and then raising the profile’s clearance to give him access to the apparatus room.