Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series Page 2

  “No idea,” he puzzled. “I have to go find out. And it’s all the way out in Zone Twelve. It’ll take me half a day just to get there.”

  She stood quickly, a look of pure dread on her face. “You can’t go on that call. You can’t.”

  He speculated on this latest expansion in her personality. She’d never expressed so much concern about his work activities. Her outburst over his leaving the planet was one thing, but over such a traditionally mundane job? However, this wasn’t exactly mundane. Repair missions were so…well, they just didn’t happen. Lea’s change in behavior and the hologram malfunction both were irregular events. The two developments combined made Harvey’s sonar start to ping.

  “Why not, Lea?” he probed, eager to get to the heart of her revelation. “Why don’t you want me to go? It’s just a routine repair call.”

  “But it’s not routine,” her high tone and quick response screamed anxiousness. “You know it’s not. You keep complaining about it all the time, saying nothing ever breaks down around here.”

  “Yeah,” he smiled. “And now something finally has,” he climbed on the PMD and gave her a wink as he rolled away. “You should be happy for me. I finally have something to do…besides talking to you, of course.”

  “NO!” she chased him, her holographic image flickering, and placed herself in front of the PMD. He pulled on the handle and stopped, even though it wouldn’t have hurt her to ride straight through her. Instinct made him stop. She was more forceful than ever with her next statement.

  “You’re in danger, Harvey,” a serious stare confronted him. Glimmering digital eyes. “If you go on that mission, you might never come back.”

  He wanted to laugh it off, but her urgency made him contemplate a serious flaw in the Intuitive Intelligence design. Grave predictions of death weren’t listed in the application’s features. Then he thought maybe Lea’s processor had some kind of connection to the base’s central computer, and perhaps she was picking up on something.

  “What are you talking about? Some kind of system malfunction? Is it my spacesuit? I never trusted those suits.”

  “No,” her brow creased. Her self-assured demeanor took an uncertain turn. “Not the suits. I don’t think,” she blinked at the floor. “I don’t know for sure what it is…I just know something’s wrong, and you’re in danger if you go on that repair call.”

  He backed the PMD and angled it to miss her once he started forward again. “I have to go. It’s my job,” he said without looking back. She became even more distraught, racing after him. He turned his head in time to watch her reach the limit of her holographic projection and disappear in a fizzle of digital artifacts, not for a second giving up the fight to stop him.

  “Harvey, don’t! Don’t go!”

  5.

  He spent the better part of the day on the train, speeding at almost a thousand kilometers an hour. Most of the trip, he slumbered in the sleepcar or zoned out on the entertainment center. Hologames were his favorite. He could spend hours playing. A perfect waste of time.

  A proximity alarm signaled his impending arrival in Zone Twelve. The sight gave him chills. Lit by a brilliant canopy of midnight stars, the extensive landscape had a softness to it. A light haze draped over the distant hillsides and flowed into the valleys, giving everything a preternatural pallor. Crosses and pillars and slabs in every direction, row after row, some straight and perfect and pristine, some broken, chipped, rotted. Up and over the knoll the markers journeyed, then beyond the next hill, then the mountain in the horizon. He hardly ever traveled this deep into the cemetery. Graves this old usually weren’t equipped with holomemorial units.

  As the train approached the transit station, he spotted the malfunctioning hologram. The unnatural image caught his attention immediately, and its contrast with the surrounding area surprised him. It radiated a bluish aura, casting several rows of graves in ethereal silhouettes which danced and shifted with the projection’s movements. From that distance, Harvey estimated at least two hundred meters, he couldn’t tell if it was male or female, only distinguished a humanoid shape, standing near a rounded granite block, presumably delivering a message to loved ones.

  Harvey never hated the damn space suits more than on this day, on this trip, with his nerves shot. He had a job to do, though, and heard his boss’s rodent voice giving him the third degree when he contemplated just skipping this thing. Who cares if the hologram is playing on its own? Nobody ever comes out here anymore…ever! Then the boss’s words repeated in his head. DeepSix had a contract. The planet would remain open to visitors for the next ninety-nine years, no matter if they spent next to nothing on the place’s upkeep.

  The PMD rocked and bucked on the ancient yard’s rough terrain, hindering his progress. The whole time, his focus remained on the ghostly sapphire glow refracting into the fog. As he got nearer, he made out features on the hologram. A man. Old and overweight, with several chins and no hair. He wore a gray suit from a century long before Harvey’s time. Probably early twenty-first century. He had a lot of energy, it seemed, and gestured angrily at his audience, likely his family, which was the norm for holomemorials.

  Harvey got closer and his spacesuit’s audio sensors picked up what the man was saying in mid-message.

  “…and I don’t want to mince words for one second. You know what I’m talking about, each and every one of you. You’ve all been treacherous, conniving little scoundrels, all of you. Your mother would’ve keeled over of a heart attack if she wasn’t already dead. That’s why I’m not leaving anything to any of you. Got that? Not a cent!”

  Harvey dismounted the PMD and stepped with caution toward the digital projection. He read the headstone’s faded, timeworn inscription. Randolph Warner. The grave marker had some class to it. Bigger than average, with marble columns and lots of artistic carvings in the granite. The man had money, and he wasn’t leaving any to his kids. That made Harvey giggle for some reason.

  “Okay, Randy. Let’s see what’s wrong with you,” he studied the hologram hardware. An old unit. That might have been the problem, though he’d never seen this kind of malfunction before. The holomemorials were triggered by a motion detector. When someone stood next to an equipped grave, the hologram came on, the message played. He shined a light into the fiber optics, searching for anything odd, a loose connection, a fried line. “Gotta be something wrong with the sensor. What else could it be? Not like there’s anyone out here on this damn planet…besides me,” he looked up at Randy, who’d begun his recorded message over again. “Well, there’s you, but you don’t count.”

  Despite combing through every connection and confirming the integrity of each fiber, he found no reason for the malfunction. The devices were simple, and never required repair. This one was no exception. No anomalies, no structural damage, no clear explanation why the playback had been triggered. After hearing Randolph’s surly condemnation of his progeny for the third time, he hit the manual reset. The projection cut off, and one ghostly vision replaced another. The stillness of Cemetery Planet snatched at Harvey like a winter chill. He trembled at the dark silence.

  The speakers in his helmet crackled and hummed with electrostatic interference. The quick, popping noise gave the illusion of something moving, creeping behind him. He knew it couldn’t have been. Had to be static. It still unnerved him a little.

  Then a sliding sound. He turned, and the lamps on his helmet pierced the fog only enough to see a meter in front of him, a sea of silhouetted headstones in the distance, mist flirting with the breeze, a low whistling wind through the massive graveyard. Nothing else. No movement. No spirits rising from the dead. He chuckled at himself for getting so worked up over nothing, then went back to finishing up with the unit.

  After a total diagnostic checkup, Harvey was convinced the machine worked fine. With a shrug, he snapped the lid closed, and then heard more static. This time he saw something, slipping through the haze, low to the ground, darting from behind one headstone t
o the next.

  His heartbeat became the only thing he could hear. His heavy breath collected in thick condensation inside the helmet visor, further limiting his already restricted vision. All instincts told him to get on that PMD and roll, get back to the train and get the hell out of Dodge. His job was done. He didn’t need to be a hero. Harvey had a weakness, though. Curiosity. He just had to know.

  He took a step, then another, then peered behind the grave where the thing had gone. Before his headlamps reached the spot, Harvey heard the crackling sound again, this time from the opposite direction. He spun on his heels, quite nimbly in the low gravity, thinking he’d catch whoever, whatever by surprise. To his shock, and considerable relief, the lights captured nothing but swirls of fine dust. Then motion, to his left, even faster than before. A grayish entity, blending with the mist, using the grave markers for cover.

  Harvey’s veins coursed with a mixture of stupidity and courage, and he bounded toward the thing, determined to get to the bottom of this once and for all. He was sure it had ducked behind a particularly large marker, and was doubly sure he’d catch it before it could scurry out of sight. One, two, three giant steps and he was there, crouching, ready for anything, but found…zilch.

  He stood straight. This time he didn’t laugh at himself. Isolation had a way of getting to a man, and isolation on a planet surrounded by millions of dead people had to take the cake.

  6.

  He got back to the train and returned to his favorite seat quickly, appreciating the feeling of motion in his gut as the maglev accelerated to full speed. Good riddance to that old, decrepit place full of stink and decay. He laughed at himself yet again. Since no one else was there to give him a ribbing, the job belonged to Harvey. Silly to let a little condensation and bad lighting make him lose all sense of logic. His imagination had conjured up the whole thing, and it didn’t help that Lea chose today of all days to begin her career as a psychic. He convinced himself Lea’s unnerving prediction had jarred him. Still, he had to be sure.

  Through the train’s computer linkup, he initiated a planet-wide sweep for life forms. No stone unturned. If there was something in the graveyard with him, the bio-scan would flush it out. It took less than ten seconds to get the results.

  Bio-scan complete. Known lifeforms: 1.

  Only one life form—Harvey. He commanded the computer to double check, just to be certain.

  Global coverage complete and double redundancy verified to 99.9999 percent accuracy. Confirmed. Known lifeforms: 1.

  His shoulders became light as a feather. One gigantic chunk of lead just flew off his back, and all he wanted to do now was get to base and continue his countdown until he returned to Earth. Ten minutes after he climbed into a bunk in the sleepcar, those plans changed.

  He must have dozed off. All he remembered was the terrible sound and then hitting the bulkhead hard, his head taking the brunt of the impact. The throbbing had concussion written all over it, though he had no time to worry about himself. Another blaring noise, a dreadful rumbling roar, filled his ears until they almost burst. The violent quaking only lasted two or three seconds. It took that long for Harvey to realize the train had slammed to a halt, skidding in the tube with a strident metal-on-metal screech.

  He peeled himself out of the bunk. The lights had gone out, replaced by the amber glow of the emergency lamps. The dimness allowed him to see out the porthole opposite him, out to the vastness of the perpetual cemetery. A chill in his bones forced his eyes away. He always felt the dead were calling to him, inviting him to join them. And now, stranded in the middle of nowhere, he was closer than ever to an RSVP.

  He felt his way through the sleepcar to a computer terminal, where his initial finding sent his panic into overdrive. Black. No power. No computer. His mind flashed with images of his own end. Slow, painful, out of air and suffocating in this dark, cold corner of death’s garden. Then a flicker of life. The screen flashed on, and the startup sequence began with a gentle, melodic tone, replacing the shrill alarm.

  Emergency backup power established. System operational.

  He ordered the computer to run a diagnostic and tell him what had happened. Within seconds, the answer came.

  Power interruption in magnetic tube.

  “Power interruption?” he asked the computer. “What could cause an interruption?”

  Two reasons for power interruption: 1. Localized outage. 2. Direct command from operator.

  “Well, it couldn’t be a direct command from the operator,” he said to the computer, but more to himself. “I’m the only operator here.”

  He paused at the thought of the alternative. An outage? What possibly could have caused an outage on this uninhabited planet? The top of his head began to throb, and he felt gingerly, finding a knot the size of his fist. The thought of having to put on a helmet and suit and go out there and inspect the vacuum tube made him dizzy with frustration. Then the lights came on, flooding the entire car with brightness, and his mood lifted. He became even happier when the computer screen showed green across the board, all systems online and ready. The power interruption, whatever had caused it, repaired itself. Soon after, the train started up again, and Harvey rushed to his favorite seat.

  7.

  “Why are you looking at that, Harvey? What are you looking for?”

  Lea stood next to him as he opened the access panel to her holomemorial terminal. She sounded nervous, yet another reason for him to believe she’d grown from more than a simple interactive program. Emotions were new. So was clairvoyance.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “This might not be anything, but in all the time I’ve been on this planet, I’ve never seen so many things go wrong all at once.”

  “But, why are you looking at me? Don’t you trust me, Harvey?”

  “No-I mean yes, of course I trust you,” he looked her in the eyes. Those sad eyes. “I’m just worried that…I just wanted to check your circuitry, that’s all. Make sure you’re not gonna break down next.”

  He hated lying to her, but something about the whole ordeal gnawed at him. A thorough inspection of Lea’s architecture, though, yielded no technical irregularities. All systems normal.

  “If you want to know something, just come out and ask me,” she crossed her arms as he resealed the panel. “You don’t have to go digging like that. I wish you wouldn’t, actually. Makes me feel violated. It also makes me feel like you’re keeping something from me.”

  He tried to find a way to ask without sounding suspicious. Then he remembered he was talking to a machine, albeit the most realistic machine he’d ever encountered. Sure, they had robots on Earth, all kinds of them. Companion Bots, they called them, machines capable of doing it all, even simulate sex. Harvey knew firsthand they were nothing like the real thing. Artificial emotion. Easy to spot from a mile away. Lea, though. She was different. She seemed so real, he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. But he had to ask.

  “Lea, how did you know something was going to happen on that repair trip?”

  He heard the reluctance in her voice.

  “You mean the train?”

  “Yes, the train. How did you know? How?”

  “Why do you have to be so angry with me?” she recoiled. “I was just trying to help you, to protect you.”

  “Protect me from what? What was it? What caused the train tube to malfunction like that?”

  “I-I don’t know.”

  “How can you not know?” he rushed toward the hologram, so cleverly and exquisitely contrived to recreate a woman who’d lived and died so long ago. “You have to know. You knew something was wrong. Why don’t you know what it was?”

  “Because I just don’t, okay?” she turned her back to him and walked to the limit of her projector’s range. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I can’t explain it. Ever since you put that intelligence thing in me, things have started to change. I’ve started to change.”

  Harvey expected to see her vanish partially wh
en she reached the space in front of the next plot in the mausoleum, Amanda Peterson, a woman who’d died in 2025. Instead of disappearing, though, Lea became even more defined as the projector from the Peterson plot powered up. She paced two steps before it hit him what had happened.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “What?” she stopped and presented a look of confusion.

  “You’re using another projector. You shouldn’t be able to go over there.”

  She looked at her own palms. “Well, it looks like I’m here,” she read the name on the epitaph. “Sorry, Amanda, but I’m borrowing your projector.”

  “This-this is impossible,” he ruminated.

  “Anything’s possible!” she let out a laugh that resonated down the long corridor of tombs built into the walls. Level after level of concrete and marble, an interconnected labyrinth of individual vaults. On her tiptoes, she flicked her heels, springing and flexing and landing with the grace of a swan. He imagined a bird, newly set free, fluttering from her cage and singing in sweet liberation. That’s what she looked like—a bird, flying for the first time after years of being unduly imprisoned.