Yellowcake Springs Read online

  Lydia put two plastic cups on the table and filled them with water from a grubby-looking bottle. “Cheers,” she said, raising her cup.

  The water was vile but drinkable. “Cheers.”

  “Gillam’s up to something,” Lydia said. “He wants to take the goods train.”

  “He wants to raid it? When?”

  “Day after tomorrow. You’ll be expected to tag along.”

  “You think I should go?”

  Lydia nodded, her shoulders hunched. “Reckon you might have to.”

  “He can’t take the train,” Rion said.

  “He’s getting desperate. Not much to eat around here anymore. I hear they’re running low on ammo as well.”

  So Gillam had been driven to this. Surely there’d be repercussions. The government wasn’t going to stand for its weekly interstate goods train being taken, was it?

  “I’d best be heading back,” Rion said, getting to his feet.

  “Don’t get shot.”

  Outside, it’d stopped raining.

  6. Withdrawal Symptoms

  Jiang Wei kept track of the time since he’d seen Lui Ping. After two hours the bus arrived at the airport. There he had said goodbye to Wang Sun, who was on a later flight. After three hours, he was boarding his plane. During the ten hour flight, he could not sleep or even think properly. He found it difficult to stomach the bowl of vegetables and rice in front of him. These, he felt sure, were withdrawal symptoms. There were several in-flight movies, but Wei did not feel the urge to reach for the earphones. He listened to the conversations of the other men, not so much for the content but for the rhythms of their speech. If only he could talk to Ping now, he might at least be able to set his mind to rest. Wei’s only comfort was in the knowledge of the special clause in his agreement, without which he’d never have signed – that he’d be able to visit her weekly in Controlled Dreaming State. He daydreamed about this for some time.

  It was night when they arrived, and the airport was no different from the others he’d seen. In fact, most of the signs were in Chinese, as were many of the faces. They walked in unison, sixty-two men who shared a similar fate, and yet Wei felt no sense of fraternity. Perhaps that would come, but for the moment all he could think about was Ping’s face, her hands, her voice. Perhaps as a consequence of his preoccupied state of mind, no one saw fit to say a word to him.

  There were checkpoints, scanners and gates to pass through. He had nothing to declare. Then Wei was given a uniform and a place to change. He complied, donning the blue overalls with the red CIQ Sinocorp logo. Then, fourteen hours after leaving Lui Ping, there was another bus. And now it was a new day, May 19.

  Everyone wanted to get a glimpse of the new country, and Wei felt glad for a window seat next to a nondescript Sichuanese by the name of Kun Meng. But there wasn’t much to see, except freeways, traffic lights and darkened housing estates. Still, it didn’t look a thing like China. Men pointed out their observations – an endless running commentary – but Wei was content merely to watch. There was no traffic which, while not altogether surprising at two a.m., gave pause for thought. No traffic at all. Such a thing would have been impossible in Chongqing. But then there weren’t as many people in Australia. Not nearly. And so the bus continued through a void, with only the false bravado of lost men to comfort him. For a while he counted streetlights, but soon lost track. The facility, he was reliably informed, was to the north. So he was heading in the right direction, even if there were more than seven thousand kilometres between them now.

  Then Wei did sleep, but only for a short while. His dream was not of Lui Ping. It was of being crushed between massive grates. When he woke, his arm flailed out and struck the cold glass. Kun Meng did not stir. Wei was surprised to note that they had left the freeway. Now the bus made its way through an even greater void. The land was...he struggled to comprehend...the land was vacant. There was no sign of life but for the streetlights and the road which cut through nothingness. What kind of place was this?

  Wei felt it through his trembling body: he was going to his doom. He could put it down to exhaustion, to love sickness, to anything, but the metal grates in his dream had been real. Wei was going to be crushed.

  But now there was something ahead, a nexus of light. The bus slowed and turned left. Wei saw a large sign at the entrance to the place he’d henceforth call his home. Yellowcake Springs, it said in both Mandarin and English.

  “Yellow Springs,” Kun Meng said, having just woken. “I knew I shouldn’t have taken this job.” He rubbed his eyes and sank back into his seat.

  “I don’t think it’s supposed to mean that,” Wei murmured. Yellow Springs, the underground hell-sewer of Chinese mythology. Rivers of brown sludge populated by wandering souls. Perhaps it was an omen. But the name was Yellowcake Springs.

  After that there was a cavalcade of barriers, checkpoints and guardhouses. There were fences, barriers and walls. But what enemy could there be out here, in the middle of nowhere? Wei’s tired mind tried to visualise such a thing. Perhaps it was the nothingness itself that frightened them. How to defend against such an enemy?

  But there were more pressing matters at hand, matters of a routine nature. Here Wei disembarked from the bus, assembled with the others in a kind of holding area, partially enclosed but exposed to the cold air. The men chattered nervously, as though expecting treachery. It wasn’t long before they were invited inside, into the warmth. It was after three in the morning, and Wei thought longingly of bed. For the moment, it did not concern him that he would be expected to bunk in a room with nine other men. For the moment, nothing mattered. And so he slept, more than seventeen hours after leaving Ping’s side.

  7. Demands

  Stepping out into the warm autumn air from the air-conditioned reception of Reactor 1, Sylvia made her way in brisk fashion toward the shuttle bus terminal at the end of the boulevard. The tour had gone smoothly, owing largely to the fact that the new Chinese workers had barely slept and consequently had not pestered her with questions. It seemed that somebody had had the bright idea of sending them on the reactor tour six or so hours after their arrival. This was just as well for Sylvia, whose grasp of the reactor’s workings was rudimentary. After all, she was in advertising.

  The three reactors at Yellowcake Springs were Advanced Pressurised Water Reactors, she had told them; CIQ Sinocorp’s own design. When fully operational, Yellowcake Springs would generate more than 3000 megawatts of energy per day. Fuelled by yellowcake uranium mined in Western Australia at Yeelirrie and Lake Way, CIQ Sinocorp, in collaboration with the Australian Federal Government, had achieved its aim of conducting the entire nuclear fuel cycle domestically. Processed yellowcake uranium was sent to the brand-new enrichment facility at Newcastle, New South Wales, where it was processed into uranium oxide and subsequently uranium hexafluoride, before being converted into nuclear fuel rods ready for use. These fuel rods were then sent to Australia’s twenty-six nuclear power plants, three of which were located in Western Australia. When the fuel rods were spent, they would be freighted to the brand-new waste management facility at Woomera, South Australia. This was part of the Federal Government’s commitment to cut greenhouse emissions to 60% of 2050 levels by 2070.

  As the maelstrom of hastily-crammed facts began to drift away, Sylvia turned her attention to the matter of lunch. It was just after eleven now, which meant she had an hour to kill before her workmates descended the Receptacle stairs for their lunch break. The thought of heading back to the office in the interim didn’t appeal, so she caught the shuttle back to Epicurus Avenue in the Amber Zone. Sylvia was just about to lay claim to her favourite table on the terrace level at the Pegasus when she received a call from Peters. She stepped into an alcove and took the call on her flip-top.

  Peters’ disembodied head hovered before her, shimmering ever so slightly. “Sylvia, have you finished with the tour?” the apparition said.

  “Yes,” Sylvia replied, “one of the technicians is sh
owing them the reactor itself. They told me not to worry.”

  “You’ve left the reactor complex?”

  “Just left, yes,” she said. “Do you need to see me?”

  “Not this instant, no.”

  “So why are you calling me? Just to check up?” she didn’t say. Instead, she waited for him to continue.

  “I wonder if you have time to stop by the office before lunch?” he said. “There is a matter I’d like to discuss with you in private.”

  “Um, can we make it straight after lunch?”

  “We can,” Peters said.

  “Is this about the tour? I apologise if I should have stayed with them until the end.”

  “No, no. It’s...it’s something else entirely.”

  Peters rang off. It wasn’t his style to criticise his staff directly. Possibly this was as close as he’d ever get to saying that he was disappointed in her. Until such a time as he made his opinion more explicit, however, Sylvia wasn’t worried.

  Two seconds after she sat down, just as she was reaching for the menu, her flip-top started pinging again. Why was she so popular today? It had better not be Peters again, or perhaps she’d be short with him. But it wasn’t Peters. It was David.

  The space before her filled with his ghostly form; she had him on full-body, which drained the battery more rapidly. Her husband looked agitated, his dark eyes darting left to right as though he could see the place his form had been projected into.

  “I need to talk to you about something,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “At the Pegasus. I’m listening.”

  “Not here, in private. Are you busy?”

  “Can’t it wait until this evening?”

  “I don’t know what time I’ll be back.”

  “Work stressing you out?”

  “You could say that. Can I meet you there in ten? Are your friends there?”

  Friends? Colleagues, more like it. “Not yet. But they will be soon.”

  “I’m on my way.” David disappeared, and Sylvia went over to the bar to order them both a drink.

  Five minutes later she was sipping her mineral water in a daze when he came barging in, all bluster and no class. David Baron was an imposing presence in any environment, but here at the Pegasus restaurant he looked more like a bull in the proverbial china shop. His shirt was crumpled and he hadn’t shaved for at least two days. He glugged his Coke down and wiped his lips. “Thanks.”

  She took his hand; it was clammy and unpleasant to touch. “What happened? What’s the matter?”

  “It seems I’m under investigation.”

  “For what?”

  “Anti-social activities, which is a fucking joke because my activities are nothing if not social. Aren’t they?”

  Sylvia nodded. Her husband, the famous engineer, was an environmentalist or, as the movement’s detractors mockingly labelled them, a ‘mental. His passion for the environment had landed him in hot water before, and it seemed it’d happened again. Such idealism did not sit well with the Chinese who were, after all, David’s employers.

  The environmental movement, which had seemed so benign in earlier times, had been radicalised by the unending planet-wide catastrophe that humans referred to as the twenty-first century. Too many people, depleted resources, too little food and water. Billions of hungry mouths swarming the planet for sustenance, for room, for light. To Sylvia this was the mystery of existence: that out of nothing should come something, an individual life. People did not ask to be born into the world, but once fully conscious of their plight they would fight bitterly to preserve that existence. And why shouldn’t they? The matter was worsened when those individuals produced their own offspring, for of course the parents would fight to preserve their children’s lives too. Thus the cycle was perpetuated. These days it was a moral imperative to decline to procreate, but it was an imperative that too few felt with sufficient conviction before it was too late. Although Sylvia had long since reconciled herself to the fact that she and David would never have a child together – he’d had himself neutered shortly after his eighteenth birthday – she wondered whether this attitude was the right one. Wasn’t any life, no matter how desperate, better than none at all?

  Naturally, stemming the flow of new births wasn’t enough to salve the ailing planet’s wounds. The time had, in David’s view, come for more drastic measures to be taken in the name of population control. He spoke long and passionately of the need for people to become conscientious objectors to life itself. In certain circles, suicide had become the ultimate form of piety. Suicides were lauded as heroes.

  It seemed to Sylvia that it was a small step from denying your body its procreative ability, through denying your body its ongoing existence through suicide, to denying the lives of others who could not or would not make the required sacrifice. This was where environmentalism had tended to dovetail with another ‘ism’ in recent times: terrorism. Thus the ‘mentals were born.

  “Is there anything I can do?” Sylvia asked. “At all?”

  He looked at her, drumming his fingers on the table. “Guess not.”

  “Did they pull you out of a meeting?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “You haven’t done anything, David?”

  “No.” He got to his feet. “Nothing yet.”

  “Where are you going? You’ve only just arrived.”

  “I need to get back to work,” he said, half pacing around the table.

  “I think you should take the afternoon off. It looks like you need a rest.”

  “I don’t have time to rest,” he said, much too loud. People were looking at them.

  “What time do you think you’ll be home?”

  “Eight, maybe. Could be nine.”

  “Can’t you make it any earlier? What is it that’s so important?”

  “Everything about my work is important, Sylvia. You know that. See you later.” And he was gone, without even a backward glance.

  8. Yang Po

  After the tour of the reactor, of which Jiang Wei would later recall little except for the pretty Australian tour-guide, they were sent back to the barracks for lunch. Everything was new, every surface clean and bright. The seats on the bus even smelled new. But Wei was so tired that he could barely keep his eyes from closing, and he spooned the food into his mouth without registering what it was that he was supposed to be eating.

  “You all right, Jiang Wei?” He looked up. It was Kun Meng.

  “I’m exhausted,” he replied. “What about you?”

  Kun Meng sat down in the empty seat next to him. “Hah! I’m too scared to be tired. Those reactors give me the fear. I don’t want to go anywhere near them!”

  Wei hunched over his bowl. “I think they’re pretty safe,” he said. The facility had been immaculate. Wei had been hypnotised by the shining displays and gleaming instrument panels.

  “I guess you’re right. But what if there’s a war? Boom! We’re all dead.”

  “There isn’t going to be a war,” Wei said. “Not in this country.”

  It wasn’t long before they were summoned again, this time to a long, carpeted room where they were invited to sit in rows before a raised podium. Wei had intended to sit next to Kun Meng, but he was directed to sit in a particular seat instead. The speaker was Chinese, and he was wearing a snappy suit in stark contrast to their own drab overalls. The speaker was past fifty, quite rotund, and his skin looked like it was slowly falling from his face, particularly in the jowl area. His glasses were precariously perched on the ample bridge of his nose.

  “Welcome to Yellowcake Springs,” the man said when they had taken their seats. “My name is Yang Po and I am the overseer of this facility. The first thing you will learn about me is that I am not one for speeches, so I’ll keep this brief. But I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I am more than just your boss here. I am your parent. I will feed, bathe, clothe and shelter you, and in return I will demand your obedience. If I ask you to fol
low an instruction, you will follow it instantly, without comment or delay. Those who cannot or will not comply will be sent home immediately. If there is a man here who would like to take this opportunity, he will be returned to his place of origin without cost to himself and without fear of further consequence. I will pause now to allow those intending to leave to do so.”

  Nobody moved. It was even dangerous to fidget.

  “Good. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate everyone here for being selected to work at Yellowcake Springs. Some of you have demonstrated aptitude in complex problem solving, others in spatial awareness, and all of you possess high general intelligence. These attributes are in great demand here. I will now distribute a sealed envelope to each of you. This paper will inform you of the job that has been assigned to you.”

  Then they were like schoolboys again, jostling and clamouring for their slips. Functionaries distributed the printed envelopes, and somebody passed him one marked JIANG, W. He could hear other men calling out the jobs they had been given. They were to be technicians, security officers, even chefs.

  Wei’s paper had four words printed on it: CONTROLLED WAKING STATE TRIAL.

  Yang Po gave them a few moments to absorb the news before he spoke again. But it did not escape Wei’s attention that Po’s eyes were glued to Wei and a small man with a restless demeanour. The man was tapping on the table relentlessly, though not loud enough for anyone but Wei to hear.

  “You will now move from here to separate rooms to be briefed on the nature of your duties. It is my aim to speak to each one of you individually within the next twenty-four hours. Until then, listen carefully to each word you are told.” With that, Yang Po stepped down from the podium and left the room.

  “You have this too?” the man alongside him asked.

  Wei nodded.

  “What does it mean?”