For new readers coming upon this series, the story takes place at the end of this century when technology has advanced to the point where travel to nearby stars is possible. Because the distances to be travelled are far too great to carry the fuel required for a return trip, any interstellar journey carrying human passengers will necessarily be a one-way trip. The voyagers will expect to remain on their destination planet for the rest of their lives and will therefore be colonists rather than scientists or explorers. Some of them are introduced in interludes to the main theme.
This post continues the story of another of the voyagers. Zack’s story is rather long, so it is published in two parts, of which this is the second (see Colonists – Interlude 5: Zack part 1 for the first part).
INTERLUDE: ZACK (continued)
The next few days went by in a blur. Zack settled into a routine. The plant operated twenty-four hours a day, with two twelve-hour shifts. At the end of the shift, two of the guards escorted the children back to what he guessed were their living quarters. At the beginning of the next shift, they were escorted back again. For some reason, there was rarely any trouble on these trips; they usually just plodded dully along, two by two, holding hands as they went.
Zack was fortunate enough to have started on the day shift, but next month he would be on nights. At the end of each day he was content to eat, watch holovision for a while, then sleep. He sometimes wondered what the Operators - he soon began to call them that, rather than children - did when they were not working. He asked a few people, but nobody seemed to know or care. Apparently they were looked after by a department called Operator Housekeeping, whose employees were considered to be at the bottom of the social scale in the plant.
At the end of his first week he had a day off and decided to go into town. Wearing his civilian clothes, he approached the main gate. As usual it was shut, but there was an identipanel against which he held his ID badge, expecting the gate to open for him. Nothing happened. Zack wandered over to the gatehouse.
“Hey, how do I get out of here?”
“Like anyone else, just hold your badge against the panel and the gate'll open.”
“Well, I tried it, and it didn't.”
“Let's see your badge then.”
Zack passed his badge to the guard, who held it in front of his computer panel.
“Jesus Mary, don't those jerks in security tell you anything? You've been here a week, right? You don't have pass out privileges until next year.”
“What?”
“Listen, son. You signed some papers when they gave you that badge and everything else, right? Well, if you'd read the fine print you'd have found that you agreed to stay on site during your probationary period, which is a year for guys like you. Now piss off and don't let me see you again for a year.”
Back at the barracks Zack mooched around for a while. The night shift was sleeping, the day shift was working, nobody was about except for some of the child workers who did menial tasks around their living quarters. Zack hardly thought of them as human by this time, indeed he barely noticed them. He still couldn’t get his smart phone to work, there was just a hissing noise whenever he tried to use it. Finally, out of boredom he made his way down to the staff commissary.
Wandering through the aisles of what was in effect a supermarket, Zack began to realize the scale of the plant. There was enough merchandise here for a town of several thousand people. Somehow he doubted that the child workers would ever be allowed here. Indeed, when they were lined up and marched them off to their barracks at the end of a twelve hour shift, stumbling with tiredness, he doubted that they did much at all until the next day.
He was examining some electronics on display when he felt a finger dragged lightly down his spine. He jumped and turned fast. Facing him with a grin on her face was the tough looking supervisor he had met on his first morning. Her name was Shana or something like that, he thought. Although he had seen her every day since then, he had not spoken to her.
“Bit jumpy aren't we, big boy? Looks like we have the same day off. What are you doing today?”
“Er, nothing much. I was going to go into town but ...”
“And you found you couldn't. Well, I'll tell you what. Since you're a real cute looker, I'll show you around today. Who knows, you might see some real interesting sights.”
In a very short time Zack found himself back in her quarters. It soon became apparent that the interesting sights Shana was referring to were under her clothes. Zack was a virgin with a strict Baptist background offset by the surging hormones of a healthy seventeen year old. He barely made it into her before exploding.
Shana gave a slightly puzzled grunt as Zack rolled limply off her. There was a slight pause. “Not done much of this, have you?” said Shana, surprisingly gently.
“Umm - this was my first time.”
“Oh my. If I'd known, I'd have done something special. Maybe not though; you'd never even have gotten into me if I had. Well, it looks like I'm going to have to educate you.”
And she did.
Looking back on the next few months, Zack had the impression of being dragged, not too unwillingly, behind a runaway sexual train. Shana was lonely and childless. Her husband had taken up with a younger woman after she had failed to conceive in ten years, and more in pride than for any other reason she had elected to live on site at the plant where she worked. She was available to sort out production problems at any hour of the day or night (their lovemaking was more than once interrupted by Shana's pager) and she got a promotion and more money. But her life felt empty.
In the depths of her mind, Shana was never quite sure whether Zack was her lover or her child. Perhaps a bit of both. At all events, as they rutted on her sweaty bed she clutched him to her in a tight embrace, as if to try to fill the void she felt within. Zack learnt a great deal, but always had the feeling of being stifled.
Often, after they were spent, Shana would talk. She was curious about Zack's background, and he to a lesser extent about hers.
“What's a nice American boy like you doing in a dump like this? Sure, you can have a good time here”, this with a suggestive wiggle, “but when all is said and done it's a dead end job.”
In the beginning, Zack was unsure whether to confide in her his crusading zeal for the children. After a while, he approached the subject obliquely.
“Doesn't it worry you sometimes, having all those little kids slaving away under you?”
“Oh, they're no danger. The only reason for having you guys around is to keep them working.”
“No, I didn't mean that. Don't you ever, well, feel sorry for them?”
“Who me? I suppose I did once, but you get used to it. They're not people, you know, just machines with hands. You keep 'em working as long as you can, then you get new ones when they're worn out.”
“What happens to them when they're worn out?”
“Beats me. I just indent for some new ones, and the old ones disappear. None of my business.”
And she would not be drawn further.
A few days later one of the machines on Zack's floor jammed and a maintenance technician was called. It was necessary for Zack to stand near him while he worked and shoo the Operators back to their posts. They had a tendency to gather around anything unusual, their mouths agape, occasionally holding hands with each other, silently watching but not quite comprehending with the remnants of their tattered minds.
The technician was a slim young Chinese with a pleasant manner. Besides the universal French, he was delighted to find that Zack could converse haltingly with him in his native language, and Zack was sufficiently bored to enjoy the challenge.
“Do these break down often?” said Zack.
“Not these ones. Some of the more complex ones on the other floors give us a lot more trouble. This one is a fairly simple, but it tends to get clogged with cloth dust.”
“I often wonder why they don't replace the Operators with machines. Then they could work twenty-four hours a day instead of having to march new shifts in every twelve hours.”
The technician grinned. “They use them because of a little thing called the human hand. Sure, we can make machines to be as versatile as humans, but they're expensive and need a lot of maintenance. These”, he indicated the Operators with a contemptuous jerk of his head, “are dirt cheap and don't need any maintenance.”
“Why's that?”
The technician paused and looked at Zack as if seeing him for the first time.
“You're American, aren't you? Yet you must have been to China to speak the language. I guess you didn't really see what it was like in the poorer districts. Me, I grew up there and worked my butt off to get out.
“Listen, m’sieur. There are nearly two billion people in China. In the poorer areas that means standing room only. If the harvest is poor, people die - many of them. When the labor agents come round, the village elders practically beg them to take their ten year olds. The more the agents take, the more chance there is that the rest of them will survive until the next harvest. Sure, I don't like seeing them here - I could have been one of them - but their life here is a lot better than it would have been back home.”
There was a fierceness about the way he said this that effectively ended the conversation. Zack stood around until he had finished, then went back to his normal work. It seemed that any interruption to the Operators' routine upset them, and Zack had several disturbances to quell on that shift. As a result he carted off several limp bodies to the body shop. He was getting to be quite skillful with his nightstick. Even Abdul, who had hovered around initially like a broody hen now left him alone most of the time, which Zack took as a compliment.
The last time in that shift that Zack went into the body shop and laid a limp form on the trolley, the medic clucked her tongue. “She'll need to be replaced soon, by the looks of her.”
“Why, how old is she?” asked Zack.
The medic picked up the limp wrist and scanned the barcode tattoo on it with a hand scanner. Crossing to her computer screen, she said “We've had her eleven years, so that would make her twenty-one or so. That's about as long as they last.”
Zack was amazed. “But she doesn't look twenty-one.”
“No, of course not. They're treated to retard growth. Makes them easier to handle. For one thing, they’re not allowed to reach puberty, otherwise you'd really have a tough job out there.”
“What will happen to her now?”
“I shouldn't worry about that if I were you. There's a special unit deals with these things. Just puts them to sleep, quietly. Now be off with you, you've brought me quite enough to do this shift without standing around here gossiping.”
...............................................……..
The weeks and the months went by. Zack settled into a routine, mainly because there was little alternative. Twelve hours a day, six days a week. Most times he was in a production center, but occasionally he did a shift or two at a perimeter gate, albeit in a role where he couldn’t access the gate opening controls. He still couldn’t get his smart phone to work, but there was an internet café where he could send and receive e-mails. Strangely enough, when he tried to send descriptions of the child workers the information didn’t seem to get through, judging by the replies he got from his family.
Shana monopolized most of his off-duty time, but after a while Zack was surprised to find himself arranging his shifts so they didn’t coincide with hers. He felt strangely guilty about this. After all, hadn't Shana told him how much she needed him, how she couldn't stand to see him even talking to another woman?
Perhaps Zack was maturing, or maybe Shana had given him confidence, but Zack was finding he liked talking to other women. Female Operators didn't count, of course. Only the occasional one could command a few slurred words. But there were plenty of other woman in the plant. A few like Shana lived on site, but most commuted in every day.
Whenever Shana caught him talking to another woman or even imagined he had, there was a blazing row.
“You lying, cheating, cunt-sniffing bastard, what do you take me for, you think I'm just another cheap whore you can pick up and put down again after all I've done for you, I wouldn't give you the drippings from my nose, you slimy streak of pig shit ...”
Zack did not have Shana's facility with words, and in any case there was little point in him opening his mouth once she had started. She probably would not have noticed. She always calmed down after a while and then made love with added zest and abandonment. Of late, though, it seemed to Zack that her rages were becoming more frequent and more violent. Zack was by inclination a peaceful person and Shana worried him. Was this what being in love was all about? Maybe he should think seriously about being a monk.
The end came a few days after Zack's eighteenth birthday. They had had an even more blazing row than usual, or at least Shana had screamed at him louder and longer than usual, and then she threw a glass vase at him. She had thrown things before, but this time it hit him hard, cutting him on the side of the head. Zack stood there in shock for a moment, then lunged at her in rage. Shana stopped her tirade, looked at him in alarm then shrank back, frightened by what she had done. Zack grabbed her and shook her like a dog shaking a rat.
He paused, and realized in a moment of clarity that he was quite capable of killing her. In disgust at himself, at Shana and at the whole relationship between them, he released her and walked out.
As he strode away, Shana came running after him. “Come back, baby, I didn't mean it, I'll make it up to you ...”
Zack turned on his heel. There were other people around, watching interestedly. “Get. out. of. my. life. you. bitch”. He walked off, leaving Shana with her mouth hanging open.
He never spoke to her again. Shana blackened his name to the best of her ability, spreading stories of his impotence, cruelty and anything else she could think of. None of this did Zack any harm. Indeed, Abdul looked at him with new respect and grinned cheerfully at him the next few times he saw him. After a while, Shana found a new lover, and things calmed down.
Shortly after this, Zack was transferred to Operator Receiving. The security department had decided he was reliable enough, and needed someone with a gift for languages who could help with intakes of new Operators. It was an iron-clad rule that Operators came from a different part of the world. North African children might be, and frequently were, sold to labor agents, but always they went to plants in Asia or South America, or anywhere but North Africa. Zack's plant had a supply contract with a Chinese labor agency.
On his first day in Receiving, Zack reported to his new supervisor, a sharp-faced middle-aged woman with badly dyed hair (her grey roots were plainly visible). “There's a new batch coming in this afternoon. No billyclubs. They're not processed when we get them. The agency sends them in sedated, and we do the processing here. Any problems, you deal with them by talking to them. If things get out of hand, you'll have a hand-operated sedator needle, but don't use it unless you have to. That stuff's expensive. Any questions?”
Zack could think of plenty, but none that he thought Hatchet-face would think relevant, so he just shook his head and said nothing. There were four other guards on duty with him, so he decided to follow their lead.
That afternoon, several closed trucks arrived, and disgorged a horde of children into the building. Zack was shocked. These were not the empty-eyed, indistinguishable automatons he was used to. These were children. Dirty, ragged, smelly, dazed from sedatives and weary with travel, but children, human children.
Luckily for Zack, there was no trouble that afternoon. He just helped herd them to where the receiving staff stripped, showered, injected, shaved their hair (crawling with lice in some cases, Zack noticed with a shudder), and put them to bed in a large room with a hospital like feel and smell to it. Whatever the injection was, they were asleep almost before they lay down. Zack saw the staff hooking up drip feeds and catheters before he left.
“What's next?” Zack asked his shift boss as they left.
“For that lot, nothing for the next week. They stay there while they're being processed. But tomorrow there's another bunch just coming out of primary processing. There's usually some action there. Bring your nightstick.”
The next morning Zack was on duty when a batch that had been received the previous week was awakened. After the initial brain-burning they were confused, with just enough residual emotional capability to feel frightened. Most of them huddled in groups looking dejected and lost, but a few became violent. There was no point in trying to talk to them, they had lost the ability to understand. The guards' nightsticks were much in evidence.
It was a morning fraught with tension for Zack, and he felt exhausted at the end of it. “How long does this go on for?” he asked the squad leader.
“Not long. They'll go into primary training this afternoon for a couple of weeks, and that soon sorts them out. They use cattle prods there, same as on the production floors, but they can turn the power up on the training units. The Ops soon get to know what's good for them.
“Meanwhile, there’s the usual one or two who didn't make it through brain-burning. You can go escort the meat wagon round to disposal. They should be loading up at the rear dock about now.”
An anonymous closed van was waiting. Zack got into the passenger seat beside the driver. In the back were some huddled shapes under a blanket. The driver, a small, thin, middle-aged man, did not seem to have any conversational powers beyond a disinterested grunt, so the trip was made in silence.
Operator Disposal was an anonymous building on the far side of the plant, well away from any of the production areas. It was in a wasteland of repair shops and storage yards, and was undistinguished except for its tall chimney. The driver made his way to the rear of the building and backed the van through a doorway into what was evidently an unloading dock. The outer door shut as the van came to a halt.
Zack followed the driver out and watched him open rear door of the van and pull the blanket away. Three small, naked corpses lay there. “OK, you can do something for a change, don't see why an old man like me should have to do all the work”, said the driver. He indicated a trolley on the dock, and Zack began lifting the corpses onto it. They were cold and stiff. He lifted them as tenderly as he could, as if his gentle handling could in some way compensate for all the indignities they had suffered.
“Come on, come on, no need to take all day” grumbled the driver. Zack wanted to shut him up, smash his teeth down his throat, but felt that violence would somehow be a further indignity to these children so he ignored him. The driver opened the inner doors of the dock and Zack followed through, pushing the loaded trolley in front of him. They moved down a short passageway and through a further set of doors. Near him was a conveyor belt, and beside it, stacked like cordwood, were several dozen small frozen corpses.
Several men in white overalls were loading corpses onto the conveyer. A supervisor was reading barcodes on the corpses' arms with a scanner. He turned round as Zack walked in. “You're just in time for the next firing. Just drop those on the conveyer with the rest.” Zack did so, as gently and as reverently as he could. The other corpses were being thrown on the conveyer like sides of beef. The supervisor looked sharply at Zack. “First time here, is it?”
Zack nodded. “I shouldn't let it get to you too much if I were you” said the supervisor with a grin, running his scanner over the arms of the corpses Zack had brought in. “We do this all the time. And sooner or later someone's going to be doing it to you and me. When you finish your shift, get yourself a woman and screw her. That'll cheer you up”, he said jovially, clapping Zack on the back.
Zack quickly walked out with his head bowed. He felt he had failed. He had come here to help these children, and here he was assisting at their funerals. No, you couldn't even call them funerals. More like garbage disposal. His eyes blinded by tears, he stumbled back into the van. On the way back, the driver became talkative. “Allah be praised, but I'm glad I don't work there. Gives an old man like me the creeps. It's alright for youngsters like you, you've got your whole life in front of you, but for an old man like me ....” and so on. Zack ignored him.
That evening, Zack got himself drunk. Being a Muslim country, alcohol was frowned upon but it was easy enough to get hold of if you wanted it. Zack wanted it.
......................................................................
Soon, Zack's first year was up. Although his contract called for him to work a further four years with a hefty bonus at the end of that time, Zack had no intention of staying any longer. As soon as he was able, he made a trip into town, and never went back. He had his passport and enough money for a flight back to the US, and that was all he needed. He took the Gibraltar tunnel back to Spain and caught the first available flight.
Zack parent's were back in California by this time, and there Zack went. It was difficult to know what to say to them. “Hi Mom, guess what, I've been helping to kill little children for the past year.” No. If he were a Catholic, perhaps he could confess to a priest, but he was a Baptist, and a not very enthusiastic one at that. Yet he could not, must not, remain silent.
It was Sarah who solved his problem for him. She had seen her son leave, a rather serious but essentially likeable boy. Fifteen months later he had come back a tortured young man. When they were alone one day, she looked him full in the eye and asked “What happened, son?”
Zack told her. Initially with dry eyes, then as the enormity of the past year bore down upon him, with tears, until at last he could barely speak. When he could go no further, Sarah held him for a while, barely able to believe him, knowing only that this was her son and he was in deep torment.
Finally, Sarah, the ever-practical mother, asked “What are you going to do next, Zack?”
“I have to tell other people what's happening there. I have to tell the world.”
Sarah thought awhile. Unlike Zack, she had been an adult when they were in China. She had a clear idea of the overcrowding and sheer competition for resources that was a part of life there. Although what her son had told her was new to her, it did not altogether surprise her. But if Zack felt that he had to tell people, if only to ease his soul, she would help him. He was her son.
“I know a journalist who works for one of the networks, Zack. This isn't quite her field, but she can introduce us to the right person. Why don't you start by writing it all down.”
Mandy Steinhof was indeed a journalist but her specialty was local politics. She had honed her skills of savaging elected representatives to the point where she could usually leave her audience with the impression that something fishy was in the works, no matter whom she was interviewing. She also played a good hand of bridge, which was how Sarah knew her. She approached Zack with the same cynical disbelief that she customarily employed with her other victims.
Zack surprised her. Most people she dealt with had a well-worn ease of manner on the surface, which usually concealed some murky depths underneath. There were always murky depths somewhere. Zack, however, was so totally unpracticed, open and innocent that she simply could not conceive of him having any ulterior motives. Yet his story was interesting. Oh sure, one heard rumors about this kind of thing from time to time, but this was the first time she had heard it first-hand. She decided to investigate further.
“Leave it with me, kid. I think we're on to something here.”
Mandy came back in a couple of week's time, apparently quite pleased with herself. “OK, I've got the United Network interested in this. I think they're going to ask you for an interview shortly. Meanwhile, I'm going to give you a bit of coaching on interview techniques. There's a lot more to it than meets the eye. Don't fail me kid - I've got a lot riding on this.”
The day of the interview came. Mandy drove him to the holovision studio, and expertly ushered him through the preliminaries. Finally Zack found himself facing his interviewer.
Magnus Wong was at the top of his profession. He could sense scandal like a retriever homing in on a decomposing rabbit. He could dissect an opponent with savagery, yet withal making himself appear a lofty guardian of the public interest. It was unfortunate that Mandy Steinhof's excited blunderings around the networks in the previous few weeks had attracted the attention of the global corporation that operated the Tangier plant, amongst others. They could buy the Magnus Wongs of this world with petty cash.
Zack, under Magnus Wong's expert probing, gave a brief version of his story. Strangely enough, it seemed to Zack, he never quite got round to talking in any detail about the child workers. Then:
“Are you aware, Mr. Gonzales, that there is a warrant for your arrest in Tangier, on charges of rape and child molestation?”
Zack was dumbfounded.
“Are you also aware that the minimum legal age for working in factories in Tangier is sixteen, and that the Tangier plant unions, where you worked for a few months, state categorically that there is no-one under that age working in the plant?”
“But, but, that's all a lie ...”
“While, of course, we can't dismiss your story out of hand, we do have a taped interview here with a Ms. Shana Boumedian, with whom I believe you worked at the plant.”
And there was Shana, telling the world how she had worked in the same department as Zack, and how shocked she was when she found him one day molesting an innocent sixteen year old female apprentice, and so on and so on. Shana was enjoying her revenge. Finally “ ... and you can't imagine how relieved I was when that monster was finally fired. I don't know what your laws say over in America, but I just hope and pray that you keep him there. I couldn't sleep easy in my bed at night if he ever came back.”
Shana's English, though heavily accented, was intelligible to most viewers. Zack never got a chance to reply. The cameras zoomed in on Magnus, as he concluded, heavily and sorrowfully, “... and this I hope, will give us all pause to consider that the good name of Americans everywhere can be besmirched by the inconsiderate actions of a few undisciplined young people. Now, my next guest tonight ..”
Zack was ushered out of the studio in a daze. Mandy was nowhere in sight. She knew a setup when she saw one, and one like this had to have big money behind it. She decided to fade into the background for a while. (She never played bridge again with Sarah.)
Zack never remembered how he made it home that evening. The enormity of what had happened did not really sink in until he was home. All his family had been watching - Sarah, Philippe and Martha - and they were waiting for him when he came back. Sarah said not a word, but hugged him tight.
He was never quite sure whether his father and sister believed his version of things or not. His mother made it quite plain that belief wasn't a consideration as far as she was concerned; he was her son, she stood by him, and that was that. But in spite of Sarah's support, he felt his life was destroyed. He knew what was happening out there, but nobody else seemed to care.
It was a few days later that he chanced to see the call for volunteers for Mayflower. Sick at heart, wanting only to put the whole world behind him, he applied. Six months later the news came that he was on the shortlist. He left for his initial screening with a feeling of relief that everything that had happened could now be put behind him.