Ellie Quin - 04 - Ellie Quin in WonderLand by Alex Scarrow Read Free Book Online Page A

had been one of the most promising terraforming projects within this solar system. There had been high hopes all round for that one; a large planet, rich with natural resources, ores, minerals, hydro-carbons. Nicely located in terms of orbit distance around the system’s sun, GL45 - a very tolerable mean temperature of eighty-one degrees. Also a very agreeable 1.2 gravity ratio that meant future inhabitants wouldn’t need to be engineered with an unattractively thicker bone structure to cope with the pull. (Gravity; always the first vital statistic looked at by potential émigré families. No one wanted to have children that would be engineered to end up looking like dumpy, thickset trolls.)
    But commercial pressures had resulted in the terraforming contract being given to a company that had recklessly promised to optimise the planet’s atmosphere and weather system within fifty years instead of one hundred and fifty.
    A fast-track terraforming program commenced that, at first, had appeared to be impressively successful. Millions of people had begun flocking to Celestion to start new lives there. But the accelerated process had quickly become unstable. With the atmosphere being rapidly flooded with trillions of cubic meters of oxygen and nitrogen, the existing natural weather systems had increased in severity, becoming an escalating positive feedback loop that had, over a number of years, magnified beyond any hope of control.
    Winds of three hundred miles an hour, tsunamis a thousand feet high. There had been localised extreme temperature fluctuations that had either frozen people where they stood within mere seconds or baked them slowly to death…hundreds of thousands had been hurriedly evacuated. Hundreds of thousands more never made it off the planet.
    ‘They started abandoning Celestion ten years ago,’ continued Shelby, ‘but the investors behind WonderLand saw the way things were going and pulled out ten years earlier. This facility was
mothballed
…I believe the term is.’
    Shelby led the girls across a sun-drenched courtyard. Grape vines wound their way along wooden trellises, rich purple clusters of bougainvillea spilled from plant pots lining a small square lawn. An auto-drone, powered by a solar cell, buzzed lazily across the beize-like grass, constantly clipping it. A jimp was busy tending to a bed of flowers with a trowel and watering can. The jimp reminded Ellie of Harvey; his four arms were slimmer and less muscular. Designed for light manual labour not construction.
    Shelby seemed to Ellie to be far less awkward and ill at ease now. To be fair, they'd surprised him. Caught him with his pants down. Literally. He now had some smarter clothes on and his unruly hair was damp and parted at the side. She suspected he’d also had a shower; he reeked of some antiperspirant that reminded her of a chemical cleaner her mother used. And now he seemed less like the startled nocturnal animal caught in the glare of a flashlight, and more like the imperious king of his own fiefdom.
    ‘WonderLand wasn’t ever finished,’ he continued. ‘Well, this central biome was completed of course, hmmm. But only three of the eight recreation biomes were functional when the project was shut down.’
    ‘Looks to me like it’s not exactly shut down,’ said Jez. She glanced up at the artificial sun, a flock of swallows swooping across the patchwork fake sky.
    ‘We keep the place ticking over,’ replied Shelby. ‘The power source is a class 3 zero-p reactor, so this facility is indefinitely self-sufficient. Yes, we keep it ticking over.’
    ‘Why?’ asked Ellie. ‘I mean, it doesn’t look like Celestion is going to be repopulated any time soon.’
    He shrugged. ‘It costs less money to keep this place turning over than it would to decommission it. Cheaper than having the whole structure hooked-up to several system transport tugs and towed to somewhere else. Anyway…I suspect the investors are hoping that one day