The Colony

By Harry Goddard & Sally Coleman

My eardrums popped as the rejection pod shot upwards through the earth, the sudden noise interrupting the sound of hissing air. It was a white sound, with silver edges – I remember it clearly. Out of habit, I reached down to my cartridge to record it, capturing the ‘fsssss’ of the pod squeezing the air of the tunnel ahead as it brought me closer to the surface. Closer to whatever lay ahead. Probably anyone else who had heard the sound was long since dead, since nobody who left ever returned. I felt a pang of sadness then, a kind of weight in my gut, but then I remembered that I finally had some new sounds to listen to and that cheered me up. 

I’d already recorded everything I could find in the colony. The sound of induction plates humming as they heated the cook tubs. The sound of a thousand mouths chewing, spoons scraping gently, with no conversation. The sound of the monitors humming overhead. The occasional bright clink of metal reverberating along the handrails – flashing out of nowhere. The heavy sigh of the rice-jars shaking, the swishing of steam through the heating pipes, and the dark sound of footsteps echoing down long, long hallways to where I was hiding. 

My name is Taal. I’m one of the last yumins, from the last family. I like to record noise. It’s my job. Except no one asks me to do it, and I don’t really do it for anyone else. 

When I was young, they told me the colony had a job for everyone, each person in their place, giving what they could for the good of each other. And I loved that idea. Growing up, I couldn’t wait to find how I could help my family. But they don’t tell you how to fit in. They just expect it. All they do is give you a cartridge to carry around, code it to match your I.D. and then run you through all sorts of tests until they figure out where you belong. 

I wasn’t good with remembering numbers, so I didn’t join the Coders. I wasn’t good with my hands, so I didn’t join the Engineers. I don’t really get other people, so I didn’t join the Psymeas, or the Medicas. I’d always steal food from the Nutrios, and I’m really sensitive to smells and sounds, so I didn’t belong with the Compostors in Waste-Management. There wasn’t really any place that felt like me.

They said it was okay if I didn’t fit in right away. I just needed a bit more time to have my edges smoothed out, so I could find what suited me best. A lot of Fledglings went through it, apparently.  So I’d knit my bushy eyebrows together, twitch my ears, stick my tongue out and roll around to make my fellow Fledglings laugh – that could be a job! – and it would always work, until the teaching servitor would stare me down with a glare. 

‘Not that,’ they said. ‘It’s unproductive.’

The other Fledglings moved on, found their spots, and I was put into the cohort behind me. And then again. And then again – and soon I was too old to join the others and was left to myself. 

My only job: ‘Find a Job.’

I still had my cartridge, which I’d carried around for so long that I now kept hanging from my hip. It couldn’t do much - just help with sums and history and taking notes and stuff. But I discovered that I could use it to record things. I’ve always heard things in colours. Hard to explain, but a certain sound will look different to me, will have a colour behind it, and that colour will give me a feeling, which helps me remember it. I thought if I went around recording sounds it’d help me find a place with a colour that I liked. So I sat at the back of the other groups, and listened. 

The soft fingers tapping away at screens – grey. 

The wheezing of pneumatics as the waste compression system squeezed down – grey. 

The calm voices behind the doors of the psyche-ward – grey. 

The noodles, boiling and rolling in starchy white water, in huge plastic tubs – grey. 

One day, I found someone from Engineering had dropped a metal nut on the floor. I picked it up, and just threw it as hard as I could. It bounced off one wall, ricocheted off the plasteel, pinged off a handrail, and rattled down some stairs. 

The explosion of colour was incredible. A bright orange, and zaps of red and yellow. I ran to the nut, started recording, and threw it again. And again. That’s when I heard footsteps coming towards me, for the first time. They sounded black, and terrible. 

‘Your noise has disturbed others in the area,’ they said. ‘Your behaviour is inconsiderate, and unproductive.’

‘But, I’m just…’

I was just doing my job. A job that no one asked for, and that no one wanted. A job that didn’t do anything for anyone else – just for me. But I kept going, and soon there was nothing else left to record. I had recorded the sleeping breaths of the habitation domes. I had recorded the steady, neverending drizzle of the showers. I had recorded the soft mewling of the newborns in the incubation wards, under the hush of the aircon. 

By the time the others from my first cohort moved past their apprenticeships, I was well and truly bored. And so, one day, I decided to try something new. 

I would make my own noise. Something exciting for my collection.

I was alone, standing in the middle of a long, narrow corridor when this thought occurred to me. I already used my voice for speaking, occasionally. I’d learnt the pale, understated murmur we all used. But what if I squished my voice around a bit? 

I took a deep breath, tensed up my vocal cords, and made a quiet ‘ooooh’. Grey, still, but underneath was a hint of something else. Pink, maybe? A shimmer of blue?

I tried again. 

‘Ooooh. Oooooooooh.’ 

I tensed and relaxed and fumbled my voice around in my throat. After a half an hour I could see the difference. Violet! With a flash of magenta! I hit record. 

‘Oooooh-iiiii-eeee-iiiii-eeee!’

Flowers bloomed in my mind’s eye, and for a few seconds I felt powerful. 

But that night, as I lay on a fresh sleeping pad in a room full of others, I felt uneasy. Somehow, deep down, I knew what I had done was wrong. Dirty, somehow. Our home was clean and quiet for a reason – yet here was I, ‘oooh-ing’ sneakily in corridors, like a criminal. I reached for my cartridge to erase the recording. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So instead I lay there, sleepless and ashamed, until the lights began to glow the next morning.

Days went by, and then weeks, and I tried to be good. I really did. But those colours haunted my dreams, and I found myself waking breathlessly, greens and blues and purples dancing behind my eyes. I felt them in my chest, like they were calling to me, yearning to be set free.

One night I finally gave in. I tiptoed from the habitation dome and through winding passages, until I found one where I felt hidden and safe. I pulled out my recorder, and filled my lungs with air until they hurt. Then I threw it all out again.

‘AAAAAAAARHGH!’

Red. Bright red. Strong red. Powerful red. Loud red. Echoing red.

I grabbed for more air, spluttering like a broken steam pipe. I focused, this time, tensing my throat into shape.

‘OOOOOOOH!! IIIIIIEEEIIIIIIEEEE!’

Dark, velvet green. Sparkling threads of gold in satin purple. Azure blue, and… And something else. Something black, and terrible.

Footsteps. 

Whatever breath I had left was knocked out of my chest. Shame flooded my mind. Step, step, step. Closer and closer. 

My family is calm. My family doesn’t rush, or panic. But I do. I turned, and I ran. 

I tumbled down corridors, panting gracessly. I tripped through sanitary partitions, biofilm clinging to my hair. I tore past a meal-prep rota of six apprentices peeling tubers, who stared horrified as frantic sobs bubbled out of me. I kept running.

But the footsteps followed, crisp and black, and I realised that I wasn’t hearing one set, but many. I slowed, my bare feet coming to a heavy halt beneath me. And from an arched doorway ahead strode a Carer. I had never seen anyone in the colony look so furious. 

No words were said, after that. The Carers simply gathered me up and walked me to a place called the Ventricle. I’d only ever heard stories. I’d heard this room called the ‘exit hall’ where the colony branched out to some other place, a place high above that we’d never really thought about before. In theory, people could come or go – but I’d never thought to ask where. 

I was about to find out. The Carers firmly, gently, strapped me into a rejection pod – an old, heavy sphere with a hatch in the side. I didn’t struggle. They pressed a button and the hatch creaked closed. When it finished sealing itself shut, I was alone in the dark. 

I didn’t know it then, but I was about to see the big sand for the first time.